The Relationship Between Attitude Toward Science and Academic Achievement in Science: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis.

Peipei Mao,Jinbo He,Xitao Fan,Xinjie Chen,Zhihui Cai

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.784068

Abstract

Science education is attracting increasing attention and many researchers focus on the issue about the attitude-achievement relationship in science, but there is still no consistent conclusion. By using a three-level meta-analytic approach, the aim of the current study was to investigate the relationship between attitude toward science and academic achievement in learning science among primary and secondary school students, and to explore if some study characteristics could have contributed to the inconsistent findings with regard to this relationship as observed in the research literature. A total of 37 studies with 132 effect sizes involving a total of 1,042,537 participants were identified. The meta-analytic results revealed that there was an overall positive and moderate relationship between attitude toward science and learning achievement in science (r = 0.248, p < 0.001). The results further found that this association was moderated by the type of attitude and larger effect sizes were shown in self-efficacy than in interest, societal relevance of attitude toward science, and mixed attitude. Moreover, the effect sizes of studies with unstandardized measure to assess science achievement were larger than those with standardized measure. Possible explanations for these findings and its implications for future research directions were also discussed in this review.

Highlights

Science education is an important subject area of study for students, as it is closely tied to a society’s economic development
To obtain the studies to be included in this meta-analysis, ERIC, PsycINFO, SAGE, Taylor & Francis Online, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global were used to identify studies examining the relationship between attitude toward science and academic achievement in science involving students from elementary school to high school
It was important to note that most of the studies included in our meta-analysis reported multiple relevant effect sizes, since correlation coefficients r between different dimensions of attitude toward science and different measures of achievement in science could be extracted from the same study

Summary

Introduction

Science education is an important subject area of study for students, as it is closely tied to a society’s economic development. One of the purposes of science education is to develop a positive attitude toward science and to enhance the interest of young people in pursuing scientific careers (Tai et al, 2006; Azizoglu and Çetin, 2009). For the economic development of a society, lack of positive attitude toward science and the low interest among the young to pursue science careers pose serious threats to economic prosperity (Osborne et al, 2003; Kennedy et al, 2016). It is necessary to understand how the attitude toward science and achievement in learning science are related among young learners, such that we may develop a better understanding about how this relationship may affect students’ choice of subject areas for learning

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