A Look at Factors Affecting Attitudes: Primary Science Teachers Towards Science Teaching

Unlike taking the summated scores of the survey items onto the Likert scale as in many other studies, this study adopted the estimation of teachers' latent attitudinal traits via the RateFOLD (Luo & Andrich, 1999) program. Factor analysis thereafter revealed first three factors that contributed to some 67% of the total variance. Teachers' subject matter knowledge was found to be the most important factor. Implications from this study were also discussed for the teachers, schools and for national recruitment.