Assessment of students’ attitudes in sciences in secondary schools using manova

Abstract

Attitude towards science subjects in secondary schools is one of the contributing factors to students’ poor performance in sciences. This prompted the Government of Kenya through the ministry of education with assistance of the government of Japan through Japan International Agency (JICA) to undertake a programme to strengthen Mathematics and Science in Secondary Education (SMASSE). We collected information on students’ attitude towards science subjects by administering the Science Attitude as Modified from the Fennema-Sherman Attitude Scale. We applied the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) to evaluate the differences between attitude towards science of gender, school, form, overall performance and the subject of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. The results showed that there was no significant difference between form twos and threes in attitude towards science subjects, that girls perceived science subjects as a male domain in comparison with boys , that girls schools had the highest scores in attitude than boys schools and that the students who perform best overall in all subjects had the highest scores in attitude towards science.