Students who study chemistry: Some affective aspects of undergraduates

Abstract

First year student expectations of their forthcoming chemistry courses, the degree to which those expectations are realised, and their attitudes towards chemistry at the end of the year were examined by discriminant analysis. A total of 1,438 Students (Ss) drawn from three Belgian universities and taking twelve different major study subjects took part. Degree of satisfaction with the separate components of the chemistry courses, unlike the overall sense of satisfaction, does not seem to be a valid means of discriminating between their differing course needs. The same is true of their expectations. Any rejection of the development of abstract thinking in universities was found not to be the result of experience prior to university entrance. Attitudes towards chemistry alone also cannot be used as a means of discriminating between populations, although attitudes do correlate with the concordance between expectations and realisations. Evidence was also found supporting earlier work of others that negative attitudes toward science (in this case chemistry) are generated by pitching courses at too great a level of difficulty. Overlap of population interests indicates that the chemistry course needs of the students (Ss) could be met by four separate courses.