Scientific Temper among Secondary School Students

Abstract

The skill of analysing and evaluating information is very important in the 21st century knowledge economy. Scientific temper is such a bent of mind which helps one in this skill by thinking rationally and logically. Scientific temper is considered as one of the fundamental duties which is also identified as the most important 21st century skill in the National Education Policy, 2020. Hence, it is expected that the present youth comprising school and college should have scientific temper as per the need of the time. It is also important to know the level of scientific temper among our school and college going students so that required measures can be taken up to develop this skill. The present study is an attempt to find out the scientific temper among secondary school students. Descriptive survey method was adopted for this purpose. 272 IX standard students were taken as the sample from the schools of Vadodara District using convenient sampling method. A scale was prepared, validated and used by the researchers to measure the scientific temper. Mean, SD and Mann Whitney U test were used for statistical analysis of data. The findings of the study revealed an above average level of scientific temper among secondary school students as a whole and in all the eight components of scientific temper with high deviation. No significant differences were observed between the mean scores of secondary school boys and girls in scientific temper as a whole and in all the eight components.