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Chemistry Teachers' Opinion of Chemistry Education

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2014

Abstract

Teachers' awareness of their students' attitudes towards a subject is an integral part of their teacher competences. Nevertheless, researches conducted in the field of attitudes towards science usually aim only at students.

This paper is focused on partial results of a research conducted on secondary schools chemistry teachers. The research followed one conducted on students (Rusek, 2013).

Both the students and the teachers were given the same questions only in conversed formulation, e.g. for students "Chemistry lessons are boring." and for teachers "My students find chemistry lessons boring." The questionnaire used consisted of three parts: general attitudes, didactical means used in education and attitudes towards particular topics of chemistry education. This paper deals with the first part of the questionnaire.

It was created using the typical attitude questions (Prokop, Tuncer, & Chudá, 2007; Veselský & Hrubišková, 2009). One of the differences between the questionnaire for students and teachers was a set of extra questions enlisted in the first half of the teachers' questionnaire.

As it was designed for grammar school as well as vocational school teachers, a question about the reason of chemistry education at schools where science is marginal was added. Another added question was about the classic chemistry education system organic chemistry - inorganic chemistry - organic chemistry - biochemistry, i.e. question to find out if teachers (especially those at vocational schools) think about integration or alternative educational approaches.

Surprisingly, the results of the questionnaire (not only in its first part) do not differ between the two groups of teachers (N = 118) even though the hypothesis was vocational school teachers will present lower values of opinion about chemistry education. Particular questions and teachers answers are discussed in the paper.