Attitude Towards Learning Chemistry: A Case Of Secondary School Students In Pakistan

Abstract

Attitude is very complex and sticky construct. Pakistani sector educational institutions offer three educational streams; Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Chemistry is a painstaking subject for secondary school students. Students remain curious during the process of learning. Students move away from Chemistry understanding due to complications. The individuals show their poor attitudes towards learning Chemistry as well. The present research was framed to examine the students’ attitude towards learning chemistry at the secondary level by gender, academic stream, locale and school type. The nature of this study was descriptive and quantitative with a positivistic paradigm. 700 individuals were selected from 35 boy secondary schools and 35 girl secondary schools. Individuals were selected on the basis of multi-stage random sampling procedure. An adapted attitude scale was used for data collection comprised of seven factors. The questionnaire was piloted tested; the first draft was distributed to 50 male secondary schools and 50 female of 10th grade. The reliability and validity of the instrument were tested by using the statistical operations. The instrument was revised for the final instrumentation; two items were excluded from the final attitude scale and was consisted of 30 items. The researcher himself distributed and collected the data from the 700 subjects. Data were inserted in SPSS-24 for analyzing the data. Standard Deviation (SD), Mean, and independent sample t-test were applied for analyzing and the data. The results show that female students having better attitude than the male students; in the context of academic stream, biology students having better attitude than the computer students; in locale, urban students possessing more positive attitude than the rural students; furthermore, public school students possessing more positive attitude than the private school students towards learning chemistry at secondary level. Further research studies may conduct on the same construct in the future at primary, elementary, higher secondary, college and university level in different subjects.