When Graeme Aitkin visited Tamaki College in 2017 he said enjoyment, confidence and achievement were vital to student success. In this post I look at how much students in junior science enjoy learning our subject
As with my last post, I surveyed 16 Year 9 students from two classes at the end of 2017. In my previous post I mentioned factors that may have impacted their data - please refer back to it :)
To find out how much our Year 9 students enjoyed science in their first year of secondary I first asked about how much "fun" they had in science. Perhaps "fun" is not EXACTLY the same as "enjoyment" - sometimes I enjoy things because I am confident, or can feel myself improving, or know I can achieve it. On the other hand, if you're having fun then you're definitely enjoying yourself. For now, fun is a fine measure.
The average score across the 16 students was 7.5, which is definitely more "fun" than "not fun."
I also asked students how engaged they are with science in class and at home:
The average score for engagement at school was 7.1, with a fairly even spread of answers from 5-10; half-engaged to always-engaged. The average engagement with science at home was 4.5.
I also decided to find out how important students thought that learning science was:
The average score was 8.9, indicating that students do think science is important.
Interestingly, one student who put they are (5) engaged at home, (2) engaged at school, thinks science is really not fun at all (3) gave the highest score for how important that they think it is (10). Does this student see science as extremely valuable to them but too boring at school; so they put more effort in at home? That's not what I want for our junior science students. I want to them to enjoy learning at school, grow in confidence and accelerate in achievement in a subject they have reported is important for them to learn.
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