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Male And Female Middle School Students' Attitudes Toward Science, Michelle Schpakow

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Women continue to be underrepresented in certain disciplines of science. Differences in male and female students’ attitudes toward science have been observed down to the middle school level. Attitudes, however, may be formed through the integration of multiple constructs: attitudes toward school science, desire to become a scientist, value of science to society, and perceptions of scientists. To fully understand the problem of the underrepresentation of females in science, differences in male and female middle school students’ attitudes toward science were analyzed across these constructs. A causal-comparative design was used to compare students’ attitudes toward science based on biological sex. …