Effect of the interaction of instructional delivery model and preference of learning environment on students’ attitudes

Abstract

Methods The sample group was composed of 347 tenth graders (180 girls and 167 boys) attending eight Earth science classes from the fourth year of secondary education. Each of the eight groups was randomly assigned to either one of the following instructional delivery models of CAI: the teacher-centred model and the student-centred model. The students’ preferences of learning environment were measured by a Chinese version of the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES), originally developed by Taylor and Fraser (1991). The scores for every student’s responses on the studentcentredness scale in preferred forms of CLES were used as indicators to display their preferences of constructivist learning environments; hence, every student had different scores to show their preferences towards such environments. The students participating in this study were pretested using CLES and were categorised as either less constructivist-oriented or more constructivist-oriented, based on their average scores on the student-centredness scale. The dependent variable, students’ attitudes towards science, was acquired through the use of the Attitudes toward Earth Science Inventory (ATESI) (Chang & Mao, 1999), which