Students' attitudes toward science and technology: an investigation of gender, grade level, and academic achievement

The purpose of this study was to examine differences by gender and grade level in primary school students' attitudes toward science and technology and to explore relationship between students' attitudes toward science and technology and academic achievement. The participants of the study were 658 primary students. A "Personal Information Form" and "Attitude Scale for Science and Technology (ASST) the correlation coefficient of which is 0.89 was administered to the participants. The finding of the study showed that there were significant differences between female and male students in terms of "interest in science" in favor of female. However there were no significant gender differences in terms of other factor "enjoyment of science", "anxiety", "enjoyment of science experiments" respectively. There were significant differences among students' grade levels towards science and technology in terms of four factors. Besides, significant positive correlations were found between ASST and academic achievement. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved