The Seventh-Grade Students’ Attitude towards Geography
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Wu, Jyun-Ping
Abstract
Previous research often found that geography is not a favorite subject to most students. This study investigates Taiwan’s seventh-grade students’ attitude towards geography based on factors from three aspects: individual, teacher, and curriculum. Individual factors are students’ gender, school location, the importance of geography, and geography academic achievement. Teacher factors are teachers’ gender, background of training, seniority, teaching innovation, and classroom atmosphere. Curriculum factors are hours allocated for geography course, difficulty of materials, and support of geographic facts. Fifty classes are selected by stratified and proportional sampling with 1392 valid samples, which account for 92.99% of all participants. Statistical methods adopted include descriptive statistics of attitude towards geography, differences test and regression analysis. The results of the study are as following.. The mean score of attitude towards geography is 3.27, which indicates that students’ attitude towards geography is generally positive.. Male students significantly demonstrate a more positive attitude than female students do. The results also demonstrate that students taking 1.5 hours of geography course show a more positive attitude than those with one hour. However, there are not statistically significant differences in school location, teacher’s gender, teacher’s background and seniority.. Result of regression analysis indicates that the attitude towards geography is significantly related to all of the six factors, including the importance of geography, teaching innovation, classroom atmosphere, difficulty of materials, support of geographic facts and geography academic achievement. Among these factors, the support of geographic facts explains best. . In regression analysis of positive attitude, the result indicates that the attitude towards geography is significantly related to the five factors, including the importance of geography, teaching innovation, classroom atmosphere, difficulty of materials, and support of geographic facts. It contributes about 40.6 % of variance being explained.he seventh-grade students in Taiwan like geography on average. This study finds that curriculum factors are important to attitude. Further improvement on curriculum factors are suggested.
Subjects
geographic education
student attitude
geography attitude
affective-trait research
curriculum and teaching
Type
thesis
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