CASE STUDY ON THE MOTIVATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS TO LEARN SCIENCE

The main aim of this work is to obtain information on the motivation of secondary school students towards Science learning. For this reason, we have made a case study in a secondary school in the Sierra de Segura (Jaen, Spain)). The area features (a small town mainly agricultural and, to a lesser extent, touristic) clearly determine the interest that students have towards learning of Science, mainly because their job prospects are not directed towards scientific development. The development of the teaching practice of teachers depends largely on the behavior that their students have in the classroom. This fact, common to any area of knowledge, is even more visible in the area of Natural Sciences, since the motivation of students towards science and its study is widely influenced by external factors. Given that we understand motivation as "those stimulus that drive a person to perform certain actions and persist in them until their completion", if we can motivate our students towards learning science, we will be able to achieve the wanted changes in their attitude towards learning of science. Moreover, from a constructivist view, learning can not be just a repetition of contents nor remain exclusively in a cognitive level, but must be based on other aspects such as: students' previous ideas, their beliefs, their perceptions, their goals, etc.; understanding that all this factors are related to the affective domain and student motivation toward learning. Therefore, we believe that the data obtained in this study are necessary and important in order to develop effective classroom interventions in the process of Educational Innovations.