Growth in Students' Attitudes About the Utility of Science Over the Middle and High School Years: Evidence from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth

The purpose of this paper is to track changes in students' attitudes about the utility of science over the middle and high school years using data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (Miller, J. D., Hoffer, T., Suchner, R. W., Brown, K. G., and Nelson, C. (1992). LSAY code book: student, parent, and teacher data for 1992 cohort two for longitudinal years one through four (1987–1991). Northern Illinois University, Illinois. Latent variable growth modeling is the technique that was used to examine the growth in students' attitudes about the utility of science. The results of the present study show that the overall trend for students' attitudes about the utility of science is positive. This means that middle and high school students have fairly positive attitudes about the usefulness of science. It is clear from the present analysis that some of the important predictors of attitudes about the utility of science include science self-concept, teacher encouragement of science, and to a lesser extent achievement motivation and science activities. The effects of the peer and parent variables were found to be quite small and statistically nonsignificant. Also it was found that the time-invariant predictors were not statistically significant. Latent variable growth modeling allows one to examine change in attitudes and also examine the effects of time-varying and time-invariant predictors. Substantive and methodological implications of this technique are also discussed.