A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ATTITUDE OF STUDENTS TOWARDS SCIENCE AND ART COURSES (Review Completed - Accepted)
This study did a comparative analysis of the attitude of students towards Science and Art courses. Also, a comparison of the attitude of male and female students towards Arts and Science courses was done. The population consisted of all the students of senior secondary schools from the six south-western states of Nigeria. The sample consisted of 1440 students selected using stratified sampling technique. The instrument used was the Science-Oriented Attitudinal Scale (SOAS) adopted from Omirin (1999). The instrument was already validated by the author, with the item validity coefficients ranging between 0.31 and 0.57, and a reliability coefficient of 0.89. Two null hypotheses were generated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the attitude of students towards Science and Art courses. The result further showed that the attitude of male and female students towards Science and Art courses are not different. Based on the results of this study, some recommendations were made. It was recommended that teachers should be encouraged to instill positive attitudes in students towards both Science and Art courses. Attitude and interest of students should be used as one of the yardsticks for admission into schools
Keywords: Art courses, Attitudinal scale, Interest, Performance, Positive attitude, Science courses, attitude