Attitudinal decline toward school science: a focus group approach with Japanese undergraduate students

ABSTRACT

Despite efforts to make school science appealing, students’ negative attitude toward it persists globally. This qualitative study elucidates how and why undergraduate students in Japan had declining attitudes toward school science during primary and secondary school. Twenty-two first- and second-year students at a Japanese national university participated in small focus group discussions. Data sources were the participants’ focus group data and written accounts on factors that influenced their attitudes toward school science. The grounded theory approach was applied to code the data, which resulted in 42 codes under 11 domains. As the analysis progressed from lower to higher grades, the domains diversified and the frequency of codes increased. The resulting hypothetical model comprising 10 code domains reveals the complex interrelationships that cause attitudinal decline toward school science. ‘Understanding’ is positioned at the centre of the model, thus indicating the importance of cognitive aspects when considering this affective issue. The findings indicate that the development of two teaching methods is urgent: a mathematics-centric approach and innovative hands-on learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes toward school science
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I thank Kohei Araya who coded the data as a second coder. I also thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing.

Data availability statement

This study’s interview data (in Japanese) are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Data used in this study can be requested in writing from the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

At the time this study was conducted, the author’s department had no established ethics committee to grant the relevant ethics approval. Therefore, the author declares that the research met the ethics/human subject requirements of another department in the same institution, the Joint Ethics Committee for the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Centre for Health Sciences and Counselling at (blinded).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grants 20K14115.