A Survey on Attitudes Toward Science and Science Teaching Among the Secondary School Science Teachers

과학(科學)과 과학교육(科學敎育)에 대한 중등과학교사(中等科學敎師)의 태도(態度) 조사연구(調査硏究)

The student's attitude toward science is generally influenced by their teachers. Therefore, teachers' positive attitudes toward science and science teaching play an important role to change the student's attitude toward science. The purpose of this survey is to investigate the status on attitudes toward science and science teaching among the secondary school science teachers in Korea. The attitudes were surveyed by the questionnaire which was developed by Sung-Jae Pak. The instrument is designed to use Likert type scale and is composed of two kinds of scale: one is the attitudes toward science scale (the AT scale) and the other is the attitudes toward science teaching scale (the AT Kale), which contains 24 questions respectively. Each of them has 6 sub-level areas. The six areas of attitude toward science are as follow: The goals and values, process and method of science, knowledge and the view of nature, social and cultural aspects, scientist and a career in science, the preferences and willingness. The six areas of attitude toward science teaching are as follow: The goals and values, process and method of science teaching, the content and structure, social and cultural aspects, science educator and a career in science teaching, satisfaction and willingness. From 152 teachers' responses, the tendency of total as well as each area and the contrast of their backgrounds at the level of 5% significance were analyzed by SPSS computer program. Some results and conclusion of the study are as follow: 1. The overall attitude of the measured secondary school science teachers shows a positive trend tendency. Also total positive attitude toward science teaching are slightly higher than that of science, which support the fact that the teachers are not scientists but they are directly involved in teaching of science. 2. The attitudes toward science are moderately correlated to the attitudes toward science teaching (r=0.52). 3. The areas of knowledge, nature-view and tile area of social aspects of science show a very negative tendency. Also the two areas are not correlated to some other areal at the level at 5% significance. 4. Female science teachers exhibit just a little more positive attitudes than those of male teachers in science teaching. 5. The science teachers who wanted to have a profession of scholar or educator exhibit a little more positive attitudes than others in science and total attitudes (AS+AT). 6. The more the science teachers have "intellectual delights" the more their attitudes toward science and science teaching are positive. 7. At the level of 5% significance, there are differences which college they graduated from, but there are no differences in multiple comparison at 10% level. 8. The differences in their background dose not appear in such as age; teaching career; academic career; deny the superstition; their onlook for the scientist or educator when they were freshmen; major the basic science; opinions about the U.F.O. and the origin of life. 9. The responses of certain individual statement are quite different from the overall tendencies, which strongly suggest the de1ailed analysis and deeper study. For the continuing study, it is recommendable to revile the measuring tools with the theoretical study for the better validity and reliability, and investigate the status of the attitudes toward science and science teaching among the science teachers with sufficient samples.