Description

Many different complex factors play a role in a students’ overall performance in STEM classes and exams. Students’ preconceived feelings about a topic, themselves, and the classroom have previously been shown to potentially affect student performance. This study aims to summarize existing research on how undergraduate students’ attitude towards chemistry specifically can impact their performance on such assessments. We will also be exploring how these feelings might vary among different groups of undergraduate students. Affective topics in Chemical Education are used in instruments intended to measure construct(s) relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes. Instruments in education and psychology are defined as sets of questions or standards used to measure human psychological constructs that cannot be directly measured unlike physical phenomena. Our research examined various instruments that are Affective in nature, specifically those focused on the Attitude component, and how those instruments evaluated as well as played a notable role in student achievement. Attitude refers to a set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors toward a particular object, person, thing, or event. The methods we used relied heavily on the use of CHIRAL, the Chemistry Instrument Review and Assessment Library, which is a repository of psychological and educational assessments and instruments in Chemistry intended to help educators and researchers find and assess instruments and assessments. Our process involved analyzing the CHIRAL database of instruments for all papers that include instruments that were coded as “affective” and "use", meaning the authors actually use the instrument to answer some sort of research question. We were then able to narrow down this extensive list to a more manageable amount for analysis based on which were most closely related to our research question. From the final instruments we chose, we then read those through the lens of our research question. Our results showed that those who had more limiting attitudes towards chemistry to start with oftentimes had lower overall performance. Overall, we concluded that there is a relationship between undergraduate students’ positive attitude towards chemistry and performance in those courses. Therefore, chemistry instructors should consider how student attitudes may develop or change during their courses.