Factors Which Determine The Continuation Of Science Education For Eighth Grade Students

Download or read book Factors which Determine the Continuation of Science Education for Eighth-grade Students written by Eric Kiemel Bull and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major purposes of this study were to provide validation data for the What Is Happening In This Class (WIHIC) with a large USA sample and examine associations of Students perceptions of the classroom environment with gender, racial diversity, socio- status, and ethnicity. The sample from eighth-grade classrooms in the USA consisted of 1,720 students in 65 classes in 11 schools in one USA state, namely California. The sample was selected as a regionally accessible area to the researcher and :)-educational classes were utilised to allow for the test of associations to gender. Students completed a questionnaire that included the WIHIC, and an attitude to class scale based on the Test of Science Related Altitudes (TOSRA). The study followed current in the field of classroom environment research by combining quantitative and ive methods. The qualitative portion of the study involved 74 interviews. This study is distinctive in that it provides a large database of student perceptions of science classroom environments and allows for new revelations of associations between student perceptions with gender, racial diversity, socio-economic status, and ethnicity. The study found that there were associations between student perception and gender and were differences in the way that students from differing racial diversity ons, socio- economics status and ethnic backgrounds perceived their learning environments. Student attitude was also found to be positively associated with students' perceptions.