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Factors affecting the attitudes of primary school science teachers towards science teaching
Author
Lee, Iris Chai Hong
Supervisor
Wan, Yoke Kum
Toh, Kok Aun
Abstract
This study aims to identify the factors affecting inservice science teachers' attitudes towards teaching primary science. It also hopes to help document the situation of science teaching in primary schools as a knowledge base for intervention studies in the future. The findings will provide insight on what could be done to help these teachers in the development and maintenance of positive attitudes towards science teaching.
A questionnaire, consisted of 8 subscales, was developed and validated with the help of three pilot studies and the computer program RateFOLD (Luo & Andrich, 1999). Unlike the conventional way of taking a summated score to the Likert scaling, RateFOLD enables a Thurstone scaling, thus birthing a continuum of locations for any item on the questionnaire. These locations, the latent trait, were then transfixed onto SPSS and Microsoft Excel to allow further analysis. In this way, the multi-dimensionality of this study would not be violated by just having a summated score. The RateFOLD, thus helps to select worthy items for the questionnaire before its administration to the participants in the main study.
A total of 423 primary school science teachers, from 24 schools in Singapore participated in the main study. As for each of the pilot studies, no less than 40 participants were involved. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. These include Pearson Product Moment Correlation, factor analysis, one-way ANOVA, frequency, percentage, means and standard deviations.
Five factors are found to be affecting the attitudes of primary school science teachers towards teaching science (ATTS). They are Subject Matter Knowledge (S), Operations of science (O), Experience (E), pedagogical knowledge (T) and Nature & applications of science (N), abbreviated as SOETN. The first three factors, SOE, affected ATTS more as they contributed to a total of 66.7% variance. Academic background knowledge (acbk) is the most important subscale of the first factor S. It is also found that acbk correlated highly with teachers' understanding and confidence towards teaching science. This implies that teachers' attitude towards teaching science could be improved most effectively by increasing their science academic knowledge (Harlen, 1997; Larry, 1996; Shulman, 1987; Ginns, 1977). Teachers with relatively poorer attitudes should be nominated for attending relevant inservice courses. Support, understanding and the acquisition of the necessary facilities from the school are also necessary. Once these factors are addressed, only then could there be better attitudes among primary school science teachers towards science teaching.
A questionnaire, consisted of 8 subscales, was developed and validated with the help of three pilot studies and the computer program RateFOLD (Luo & Andrich, 1999). Unlike the conventional way of taking a summated score to the Likert scaling, RateFOLD enables a Thurstone scaling, thus birthing a continuum of locations for any item on the questionnaire. These locations, the latent trait, were then transfixed onto SPSS and Microsoft Excel to allow further analysis. In this way, the multi-dimensionality of this study would not be violated by just having a summated score. The RateFOLD, thus helps to select worthy items for the questionnaire before its administration to the participants in the main study.
A total of 423 primary school science teachers, from 24 schools in Singapore participated in the main study. As for each of the pilot studies, no less than 40 participants were involved. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. These include Pearson Product Moment Correlation, factor analysis, one-way ANOVA, frequency, percentage, means and standard deviations.
Five factors are found to be affecting the attitudes of primary school science teachers towards teaching science (ATTS). They are Subject Matter Knowledge (S), Operations of science (O), Experience (E), pedagogical knowledge (T) and Nature & applications of science (N), abbreviated as SOETN. The first three factors, SOE, affected ATTS more as they contributed to a total of 66.7% variance. Academic background knowledge (acbk) is the most important subscale of the first factor S. It is also found that acbk correlated highly with teachers' understanding and confidence towards teaching science. This implies that teachers' attitude towards teaching science could be improved most effectively by increasing their science academic knowledge (Harlen, 1997; Larry, 1996; Shulman, 1987; Ginns, 1977). Teachers with relatively poorer attitudes should be nominated for attending relevant inservice courses. Support, understanding and the acquisition of the necessary facilities from the school are also necessary. Once these factors are addressed, only then could there be better attitudes among primary school science teachers towards science teaching.
Date Issued
2003
Call Number
Q183.4.S55 Lee
Date Submitted
2003