PISA 2006: Student attitudes to and engagement with science: How ready are our 15-year-olds for tomorrow's world?

Chapter 1: Introduction

The relationship between students’ achievement in science and their attitudes to and engagement with science is also examined, and comparisons are made by gender, main ethnic groupings, and socio-economic background. The international findings from PISA 2006 were published by the OECD in two volumes in 2007 (OECD 2007a & 2007b). A summary of key New Zealand results from this study was published in December 2007 (Telford & Caygill 2007). Other New Zealand reports in the series include a report on 15-year-old students’ science achievement, the school context within which science education takes place, and reports on the mathematics and reading achievement of students in PISA 2006.¹

The late Professor Alan MacDiarmid² is quoted as saying, “Science education is the most important investment the country could make for the future” (Crean 2007). However, he also criticised the low regard he felt New Zealanders had for science, and pointed to the likely impact on the education of our students. How students feel about a subject, their interest, and the value they place on it for their future life seem intuitively to be linked to both the effort they put into trying to succeed and the outcomes of their education in that subject. Indeed, a number of studies (for example, Chiu & McBride-Chang 2006, Chamberlain 2007, Cullen 2006) have demonstrated a relationship between achievement in school subjects and enjoyment.

Future practitioners in science-oriented jobs are likely to come from those who enjoy learning science and are interested in becoming life-long learners. In a recent annual Survey of Employers who have Recently Advertised (SERA, Department of Labour 2007), skills shortages in science-related occupations were among the highest when compared with other occupations. Given these skill shortages, an examination of attitudes at the point of life where students are beginning to make important decisions affecting their futures seems pertinent.

PISA attitudinal framework

In PISA, attitudes are seen as a key component of an individual’s scientific literacy, and include an individual’s beliefs, motivational orientations and sense of self-efficacy (belief that they can perform scientific literacy tasks). As part of assessing scientific literacy among 15-year-old students in PISA 2006, students were given a questionnaire which included questions on engagement and motivation, as well as questions on personal background, learning habits, and perceptions of the learning environment. In addition, during the science assessment students were questioned about their attitudes to the issues being tested for a small selection of test questions.

The OECD framework for scientific attitudes included three areas: interest in science, support for scientific enquiry, and responsibility towards resources and environments (OECD 2006). This evaluation of attitudes was not intended to examine attitudes to science programmes or teachers, but rather to gain an understanding of students’ general appreciation of science, their specific scientific attitudes and values, and their responsibility towards selected science-related issues that have national and international ramifications. According to the OECD (2006), interest in science was selected because of its established relationships with achievement, course selection, career choice, and lifelong learning. Support for scientific enquiry is widely regarded as a fundamental objective of science education and responsibility towards resources and environments is of international concern as well as being of economic relevance.

Report structure

This report is divided into seven chapters. After this brief introduction, Chapter 2 looks at students’ interests in and enjoyment of science, along with their motivation to learn about and engage in science. Chapter 3 examines students’ beliefs in their own abilities in science, including how good they believe they are at science (self-concept) and how easy they think scientific literacy tasks are (self-efficacy). Chapter 4 presents the science activities that students reported engaging in. Chapter 5 looks at students’ value beliefs regarding science, including their general appreciation of science and scientific enquiry as well as their perceptions of the importance of science to them personally. Chapter 6 looks at students’ attitudes toward the environment, and Chapter 7 concludes the report with a brief summary.

Footnotes

1. Caygill et al. 2008; Marshall et al. 2008; others in press.
2. New Zealand-born Alan MacDiarmid was a world-renowned chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000.