The effect of the Open Event on students’ attitudes towards science in school across the transfer from primary to secondary education

Although the importance of students having a ‘good transition’ and the dangers of students’ having a ‘bad transition’ in the transfer of schooling are well known within England there has been a lack of research on the effect that specific events have on students within that transition period. Therefore this study looks at a specific transition event, termed the Open Event, and how attending such an event might impact on students attitudes to science in school across the transfer from primary to secondary education. The study is based on cross sectional data collected from 23 English schools covering students aged between 9 years old (Year 5) to 14 years old(Year 8) which were deemed the ‘transition years’ as these two years cross the primary/secondary school divide. It involved using questionnaires as well as student and interviews with science staff in the secondary schools as well as focus groups. Field notes and audio-recordings were made throughout these visits to aid in analysis. The findings suggest that in trying to market itself and generate short term student interest at the Open Event, the science departments in these secondary schools inadvertently promoted a misconstrued image of secondary school science that can adversely affect not only students’ attitudes towards science in primary school but also change some students’ perception of the nature of school science. For some students attending an Open Event results in a decline in their attitude toward primary school science due to perceiving their primary school lessons, in contrast to what they have seen in the secondary school, as not being ‘proper science’. Although, for the majority of students, this effect seems to last for only one academic term there is an embedded misconception, due to the misconstrued image of science observed at the Open Event, that secondary school science will be mainly practical in nature. The implication of this study is that the discordance between the realities of science in school and students’ misconstrued expectations of science in school, developed from attending the Open Event, may play a role within the dip that has been reported in students’ attitudes towards science following their transition from primary to secondary education. As such giving a more realistic image of what actually occurs in secondary school science during Open Events may be more advantageous in the long term than focusing on developing a short term, unsustainable, image of science.