IMPACT OF MULTIMEDIA ASSISTED TEACHING ON STUDENT ATTITUDES TO SCIENCE SUBJECTS

Abstract

During the last decades, multimedia assisted teaching has expanded to all types and levels of schools. The authors dealt with a question whether there is a possibility through the application of multimedia teaching materials in the natural science school subjects to eliminate students' negative attitudes to these subjects. To answer this question, a research was carried out in which the attention was paid to possibilities to eliminate students` negative attitudes to physics as the most unpopular school subject. The authors show how various aspects of students` opinion on physics can be changed due to the use of animations and interactive simulations of the physical phenomena in the teaching process. For the pedagogical intervention two kinds of multimedia teaching materials were used. The difference between them was in the level of their interactivity. Within the research students` attitudes to physics through the given explored aspects were assessed twice, once before the multimedia teaching material pedagogical intervention and the second time after it. As the research results show, although it is possible to certain rate to eliminate students` negative attitudes to physics, this possible elimination depends also on the level of the intractivity of the used multimedia teaching materials. Key words: change of the attitudes, multimedia assisted teaching, negative attitudes to school subjects, teaching physics.