Worldwide studies have revealed an important issue in that an increasing percentage of students within the X -Y age group are not interested in science. Many students, especially females, have negative feelings and attitudes toward science, which discourages them from continuing with scientific inquiries. There are limited studies related to the factors predicting school students' attitude toward science; therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine the relationships among the seventh grade elementary students' attitudes toward science, their learning approaches, motivational goals, science achievement and students' nature of science (NOS) views. The questionnaires for this study were administered online to 3,598 seventh grade students in different regions and cities of Turkey. The convenience sampling method was used in this study. The correlation results revealed the positive relationship between attitude toward science and the other variables. Multiple regression analysis indicated that while students' meaningful learning, self-efficacy, and nature of science views have a positive contribution, rote learning contributed negatively to the model. The findings also showed that parents' income and education level had a significant effect on students' attitude toward science.

This study focuses on two main issues concerning changes in student attitudes toward science study and their perceptions of its usefulness in their lives. Information has been gathered concerning how student attitudes toward science have changed for teachers and schools not involved with any funded professional development project. Pretesting and posttesting were administered with such “control” groups at the same intervals corresponding with the data collected from students with teachers enrolled in five funded Professional Development projects over the 1981–2008 interim. The grade levels used by the National Assessment of Education Progress in their 1977 assessment of science were used; it focused on students in grades 3, 7, and 11. The results indicate a steady decline in student positive attitudes concerning their science study as grade levels increase. Conversely, the student perceptions of the usefulness of their science study as related to daily living, further science study, and for potential careers remained much the same over the 30‐year interim is a second focus. Generally, results indicate that traditional teaching and major use of textbooks cause increasingly negative student attitudes about science while not producing major changes in their perceptions of its usefulness in their lives.

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