Majors’ Gender-Based Affective States Toward Learning Physical Chemistry - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 289

sciences—areas that are at the heart of sustainable socio-economic development—even the
absolute number of students is falling in some countries. Indeed, some universities in
Europe are reporting a halving in the number of students enrolled in physics since 1995.
When looked at from a gender perspective the problem is even worse as, in general,
girls are less interested in science education than boys. As shown by the OECD Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, at 15 years old, there is already a
strongly gendered pattern and in most countries females are significantly less interested in
mathematics than males. This pattern of gender differences continues with women choos-
ing fewer academic studies in math, science and technology (MST). In fact, at the European
level, girls account only for 31 % of MST graduates (Rocard et al., 2007 , p. 7).
As clearly stated, the status quo will not meet the future society needs of society
with regard to advancements in science and technology. This alerts us, the chem-
istry educators , to track and detect the perceptions of students encountering various
core chemistry courses as majors. Findings of these types of studies may lead to a
change in the way we teach majors at the undergraduate level so that we might
better support their interest in chemistry, their future learning in graduate courses in
chemistry, and their entry into science-related careers.

2 Conceptual Framework

When it comes to practice of science teaching, teachers epistemological theories

affect classroom tasks and pedagogical practices. The classroom tasks and teaching
practices have an impact on students

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affective states toward learning science. All
of these artifacts are modeled under the umbrella of epistemology.
Epistemology refers to the nature and justification of human knowledge (Hofer,
2001 ). Studies about epistemology have been developed with different names in
literature—epistemological beliefs (Jehng, Johnson, & Anderson, 1993 ; Kardash &
Howell, 2000 ; Schommer Aikins, Duell, & Hutter, 2005 ), reflective judgment
(King & Kitchener, 1994 ; Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, & Wood, 1993 ), ways of
knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986 ; Clinchy, 1995 ), episte-
mological reflection (Baxter Magolda, 1999 ), epistemological theories (Hofer,
2001 , 2008 , 2010 ), and epistemic beliefs (Bendixen, Schraw, & Dunkle, 1998 ).
Figure 1 models how personal epistemological beliefs affect the classroom teach-
ing. Teachers bring epistemological beliefs along with connected pedagogical
practices to classroom. Students arrive in the classroom with existing epistemolog-
ical beliefs and theories that lead to interpretations of instruction.
In time, students

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beliefs change and so their interpretations. The outputs of
these dynamic constructs affect student motivation and strategy selection. Learning
occurs in conjunction with motivation and strategy selection. Thus, according to
this model, motivation as an affective state is a key variable to understanding
student learning better. In the section that follows, we will provide a working
model of motivational categories and then focus on motivation to learn science.

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