Students’ attitudes toward school chemistry: The effect of interaction between gender and grade level

Being one of the constructs of the affective domain, attitudes have been researched deeply for more than 40 years (Aiken & Aiken, 1969; Koballa & Crawley, 1985; Koballa, 1988). The need for conducting studies, related to attitude, was undertaken for two main reasons; namely the attitudes’ feasible power to predict future behaviors like subject and career preferences of students (Koballa, 1988; Osborne, Simon & Collins, 2003), and the correlation existing between attitude and academic achievement (Schibeci, 1984; Shrigley, 1990; Weinburgh, 1995; Osborne & Collins, 2000). In their meta-analysis of attitude related factors that predict future behaviors, Glasman & Albarracín (2006) concluded that there is a correlation between attitudes and future behaviors; that is, attitudes are a potential for predicting future preferences, especially if there is a direct interaction between participants and the attitude object (i.e. objects that related to attitude like science lessons). Actually, studies that examined the correlation between attitude and academic achievement did not provide consistent results. Schibeci (1984), for instance, found a strong relationship between attitude and achievement. Shrigley (1990), on the other hand, argued that there is only moderate relationship between attitudes toward science and science achievement.

The attitude literature has concentrated on a range of aspects (Osborne et al., 2003) such as defining attitude and making a distinction among similar terms (Koballa, 1988), defining attitude objects (Spall, Dickson & Boyes, 2004), and developing attitude constructs (Kind, Jones & Barmby, 2007). Since these concerns are necessary for deeper understanding of the theory of attitudes, all three aspects have been documented here.

Accumulation of information related to the importance of attitudes in education required science programs to include science-related attitudes. One of the aims of the Turkish secondary school science program, for instance, was to develop positive attitudes toward science (Ministry of National Education [MNE], 2007). This led to a consideration of what is meant by the apparently simple term “attitudes toward science” and also “scientific attitudes”. Gardner (1975a) made a distinction between these two concerns, describing the latter as a scientific thinking and questioning strategy that can be treated under the cognitive domain (Osborne et al., 2003), whereas describing “attitudes toward science” as a learned tendency to evaluate in certain ways, which is the aspect within the scope of the present study.

The attitudes toward science is related to positive or negative feelings about scientific objects and enables prediction of scientific attitudes (Koballa & Crawley, 1985). Schibeci (1983) argued that various objects can be related to attitudes like science lessons, scientists, science in real life, and etc. This leads to the question- do students differ in their attitudes toward science and chemistry? This critique question has already been the subject of research by studies (Havard, 1996; Spall et al., 2004) pointing out that treating different branches of science lessons under the general heading (i.e. science) may cause deviated results; that is, students’ attitudes toward chemistry and physics or any other branches of science may vary. In fact, subject preference studies (Havard, 1996; Osborne & Collins, 2000) are not very common due to the objectiveness problems related to the measurement; that is, students give answers to the items within the scale in a relative manner (Osborne et al., 2003) which may not indicate the real situation. Among limited studies, Osborne & Collins (2000) investigated 16-year-old students’ attitudes toward science lessons and found that chemistry is the least favorite branch of school science.

“Attitudes toward science” is a term that is treated most of the time as a unique concept, but analyses are needed to check whether the scale is unidimensional as this is important for both reliability and validity concerns (Osborne et al., 2003). The attitude literature confirmed that there are constructs that contribute in varying proportions to the attitudes of students (Osborne et al., 2003) which are formed with respect to contexts (Barmby, Kind & Jones, 2008). Overall, both the nature of sampled individuals and attitude itself require controlling for dimensionality of the scale used to collect data. Kind et al. (2007) developed a set of constructs in order to solve the problems related to the dimensionality of scales which are importance of science, learning science in school, practical work in science, science outside of school, self-concept in science, and future participation in science. Eccles & Wigfield (1995) combined the constructs “interest, importance, and utility” under the term “task value” which can be defined as the degree to which an individual trusts a task for accomplishing an individual’s needs or goals.

Since attitudes are not the same for different objects and studies confirmed that attitude, in most cases, is a multidimensional variable (Gardner, 1995), it is thus crucial to define the scope of the study, explicitly. The focus of the current study is on secondary school students’ attitudes toward chemistry as a school subject in Turkey (Grades 9-11).

Besides defining attitudes and dimensions of attitude, the literature deals widely with the factors affecting attitude toward science. Grade levels (Hofstein, Ben-Zvi, Samuel & Tamir, 1977; Yager & Yager, 1985; Simpson & Oliver, 1990; Francis & Greer, 1999; George, 2006; Barmby et al., 2008), gender (Hofstein et al., 1977; Harvey & Stables, 1986; Francis & Greer, 1999; Barmby et al., 2008), achievement (Weinburgh, 1995; Salta & Tzougraki, 2004) are some of the most investigated factors affecting secondary school students’ attitudes toward science. However, this paper will discuss solely the studies that focused on the effects of gender, grade level, and interaction of them (i.e. gender and grade level) on attitudes toward chemistry as a school subject. Actually, results of the studies that dealt with attitude changes among students of different age groups or gender are not consistent. Hofstein et al. (1977), for instance, examined Grades 11 and 12 Israeli students’ attitudes toward chemistry over time and they concluded that there is a decline in students’ attitudes toward school chemistry as they progress from Grade 11 to 12. Kan & Akbaş (2006) surveyed 1000 students studying at the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades of high schools in Turkey. Contrary to Hofstein et al., they found that attitude scores toward chemistry courses are a maximum at the 2nd grade of high schools.

The attitude literature includes various studies that investigated gender differences in students’ attitudes toward chemistry courses. Some of the studies reported that female students’ attiudes toward chemistry lessons are higher than male students (Hofstein et al., 1977; Dhindsa & Chung, 1999). Some of the studies, on the other hand, found the opposite situation in their cases; that is, boys have more positive attitudes to chemistry lessons than girls (Harvey & Stables, 1986).

Inconsistent results of the studies may arise from various factors such as examining different constructs of attitudes (Osborne et al., 2003), not considering dimensionality of data (Rennie & Parker, 1987), and not analyzing the interaction between grade level and gender (George, 2006; Cheung, 2009). The literature confirms that gender and grade level can interact with each other (George, 2006); that is, female or male students may have different attitudes toward chemistry as time passes. However, the number of studies that investigated the interaction effect on attitude are very scarce. Cheung’s (2009) study is an informative one which explored the interaction effect between grade level and gender on secondary school students’ attitudes toward chemistry lessons in Hong Kong. Attitude toward chemistry lessons was evaluated using four dimensions that were liking for chemistry theory lessons, liking for chemistry laboratory work, evaluative beliefs about school chemistry, and behavioral tendencies to learn chemistry. According to the results of the study there was a significant interaction effect between grade level and gender on secondary school students’ attitudes toward chemistry lessons.

Having mentioned significant concerns within the attitude literature, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of interaction between gender and grade level on secondary school students’ attitudes toward chemistry as a school subject across Grade 9-11, in Turkey.