Thai university students' beliefs about chemistry and learning chemistry: Relationships between epistemic beliefs and past learning experiences

Abstract

© Common Ground, Takayoshi Fujiwara, Prapaphim Liptapanlop. The purpose of this study was to examine how similar Thai university students were to the experts in chemistry in terms of what they believe about chemistry and learning chemistry. The study was also to identify the relationships between the beliefs and the students' demographic characteristics. The participants (N = 319) were undergraduate students studying in a Thai university. They were all Thai native speakers and of Thai nationality. The participants completed a fifty-item questionnaire, the chemistry version of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS-Chem) developed by Barbera et al. (2008). The Thai students were less expert-like than the American students examined by Barbera et al. (2008) in terms of their beliefs about chemistry and learning chemistry. This level of similarity to the experts was significantly different among the students with different subject majors and with different secondary school backgrounds. Through principal component analysis, a three-factor structure was identified for the beliefs. At the three dimensional levels, the beliefs were significantly different among the students with different subject majors. It appears that the students' past learning experiences in chemistry, science, and in general, could be the key factor for the development of their beliefs about chemistry and learning chemistry. The findings highlight the types of the beliefs that we need to address to enhance the students' epistemological development.