School, family, and student factors behind student attitudes towards science: The case of Hong Kong fourth-graders

While East Asian students have consistently achieved extraordinary science achievement, they demonstrated below-average attitudes towards science. It was unclear what the associations are among attitudes toward science, and influences from school, family, and student themselves. By analyzing a sample of 3600 fourth-graders from 132 Hong Kong schools, we found that the family- and student-related factors (book ownership, parent education, student gender and attitudes to school) had significant correlations with student attitudes toward science, but the school-related factors (school environment and teacher characteristics) did not show significant influence on students' science attitudes. These findings may shed light on what the influences that seem to play behind these high achieving students' relatively low attitudes in science.