SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS LEARNING CHEMISTRY: COMPARISON BY GENDER, AGE AND EDUCATIONAL STREAM

Abstract

There is a dilemma among secondary school students’ attitudes towards learning chemistry in public sector educational institutions. Chemistry is considered as complicated and painstaking subject for students. Research was conducted to explore students’ attitudes towards learning chemistry of public sector secondary school students of district Lahore. Researchers used quantitative research approach based on positivist paradigm through conducting survey. Sample consisted of randomly selected enrolled 700 secondary school students: 350 male and 350 female. Questionnaire was administered to measure students’ attitudes based on 5-point Likert type options. Content validity of the instrument was confirmed from three expert opinions, and reliability was measured by calculating Cronbach’s Alpha Scores .841. Normality of the data was confirmed by calculating Shapiro-Wilk’s test, p > .05, n < 2000. Data were analyzed in SPSS by calculating independent sample t-tests and one-way ANOVA. Findings revealed significant difference between students’ attitudes towards learning chemistry by gender and no significant difference was found between science and computer science streams. Findings further revealed that students having 14-15 years of age have more attitudes towards learning chemistry as compared to students having 15-16 and 16-17 years of age. It is recommended that female secondary school teachers need to organize classroom activities to arouse female students’ interest towards learning chemistry. Teachers during delivering lectures need to concentrate on students’ cognitive level and age group. They feel themselves as teenagers because 10th grade students have less understanding regarding chemistry. Heads of the institutions should check teachers’ and students’ classroom activities as well. Keywords: educational stream, learning chemistry, secondary level, students’ attitudes.