Teaching science at Finnish secondary school has been organised into
two pairs of subjects, into physics and chemistry and into biology and
geography. In our study, we investigated, the extent to which this bisection
can also be observed in students’ attitudes towards science subjects in basic
education. The study questions were 1) What differences in attitudes do the 9th
graders have between learning physics, chemistry, biology and geography, 2) How
are the science subjects grouped in students’ attitudes? Are they forming pairs
such as physics and chemistry or biology and geography? 3) What issues do
students experience as being pleasant/unpleasant when studying these subjects?
The data were collected from Finnish 9th graders (n=167) using four
questionnaires with exactly the same items. In the questions, only the subject
towards which the attitudes were studied, varied in the four test versions. The
questionnaires were based on the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science
Survey (CLASS), which we shortened and translated into Finnish. The results
showed, that the 9th graders attitudes towards four science subjects have a lot
in common. However, the attitudes towards physics and chemistry on the one hand
and the attitudes towards biology and geography on the other were more similar
to each other than the attitudes between other pairs of science subjects.