Attitudes and academic yield: its evolution from general and inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry

This work has a double aim, on the one hand, to value the attitudes towards the chemistry of university students of biological careers in two courses related to this discipline and, on the other hand, to relate these attitudes to the academic yield presented by the students. The chosen instrument to measure the attitudes of the students was a questionnaire according to the Likert scale; the totality of students who attended each one of the analyzed courses of chemistry, General and Inorganic Chemistry (GIC) and Organic Chemistry (OC), were polled. In order to consider the academic yield, proceedings of midterms were analyzed and calculations of correlation were made. The students who attended GIC presented attitudes towards chemistry valued like indifferent. Nevertheless, at the end of OC attitudes of students were evolving favorably, since the obtained average score for the positive and negative items was in the rank of positive attitudes. The values of the obtained coefficient of Pearson for both courses studied were superior to 0.80, which indicates a strong relation between the implied variables. Whereby, it follows the importance of developing positive attitudes towards chemistry to favor the academic yield of the students.