Insights into secondary students’ attitudes towards school science in Bangladesh

This PhD sought to understand secondary students’ attitudes towards school science by focusing on students’ voices. Most of the previous studies measured attitudes using Likert-type attitude scales, where the given statements and choices are prepared by researchers and thus the statements mostly reflect their ideologies. Being receptive to student voices, this study therefore conducted five Focus Group Interviews (FGI) with 32 purposively selected secondary students (Grades 9 and 10) of an urban school in Bangladesh to develop an open-ended questionnaire that was used to understand the general pattern of attitudes of all the students of the same school. After distributing the questionnaire among 450 students, 141 questionnaires were returned with responses. A hybrid approach to thematic analysis consisting of a combination of inductive and deductive approaches was followed in analysing the data. Findings revealed that most of the students considered science as an interesting subject whereas most of the students in developed countries reported science to be boring. Students in this study at the same time found science difficult to study, which is consistent with other research in developed countries. Students found science teaching to be conducted in mostly transmissive styles where students remain passive recipients. An overloaded science curriculum was another characteristic of school science of Bangladesh reported by students, which is also a common characteristic of school science worldwide. Students noted that their science textbooks, the de-facto curriculum in Bangladesh, were dominated by large amounts of content that needed to be covered in a very short period of time. The content in science textbooks was also reported as being outdated and presenting science as factual knowledge. Language used in science textbooks was seen as highly sophisticated, thus inappropriate for their age. The current assessment system required students to memorise the abstract content in science textbooks and recall exactly the same in exam papers. As a result, the assessment practices left little space for developing the higher order skills of Bloom’s Taxonomy, such as application, analysis or synthesis skills. Such an assessment system also limited the scope for hands-on teaching and learning; teachers reportedly relied on promoting student memorisation. Despite having a number of negative experiences, students were still interested in engaging with school science and science related careers in future. The common reasons for choosing science were to facilitate a future career and to satisfy parental and societal demands. Behind this lies a strong cultural belief that studying science is a pathway to respect in the community and better long term employment opportunities. These in-depth insights revealing students’ attitudes could help change students’ classroom experience. Curriculum and pedagogy would benefit from taking account of students’ expressed needs and perceptions rather than relying on a score obtained from scales measuring attitudes. The findings could also help understand the differences in needs in science education in developing country contexts. Given that most of attitudes studies are quantitative and ask students questions that researchers feel it is important to know about, this PhD contributes to the methodology of attitude studies by showing the application of an innovative method of inquiry and capturing student voices. Data gathering instruments were also developed to best access their voices. Such a methodology would help in providing new directions in studying attitudes. While a few qualitative studies have been done on perceptions about school science in developed countries, this study is a unique contribution for less developed or developing countries. The literature on attitudes related to science and school science is dominated by Western contexts with little exploration of how non-Western students deal with Western science. This study showed qualitatively how students in a non-Western developing country experienced Western school science.