Yhdeksäsluokkalaisten asennoituminen science-aineisiin aineittain ja aineryhmittäin tarkasteltuna Attitudes of 9th graders towards different science subjects

Teaching science at Finnish secondary school has been organised into two pairs of subjects, into physics and chemistry and into biology and geography. In our study, we investigated, the extent to which this bisection can also be observed in students’ attitudes towards science subjects in basic education. The study questions were 1) What differences in attitudes do the 9th graders have between learning physics, chemistry, biology and geography, 2) How are the science subjects grouped in students’ attitudes? Are they forming pairs such as physics and chemistry or biology and geography? 3) What issues do students experience as being pleasant/unpleasant when studying these subjects? The data were collected from Finnish 9th graders (n=167) using four questionnaires with exactly the same items. In the questions, only the subject towards which the attitudes were studied, varied in the four test versions. The questionnaires were based on the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS), which we shortened and translated into Finnish. The results showed, that the 9th graders attitudes towards four science subjects have a lot in common. However, the attitudes towards physics and chemistry on the one hand and the attitudes towards biology and geography on the other were more similar to each other than the attitudes between other pairs of science subjects.