Attitude of Students Towards Physics: It’s Influence to Their Academic Performance

2. Attitude is a way of thinking or feeling about a particular thing, that is impacted by one’s behavior. Knowledge is information gained through education showing understanding of the topic. Information can add onto people’s knowledge of a particular subject that results in a change of attitude about it. It is important for writers to learn about the difference due to gauge the audience away from their biases through certain attitudes on topics in order to acquire knowledge. The reader will keep having a certain opinion on the topic (showed by their attitude)if they're not educated.

Attitudes can also arise due to observational learning, wherein people internalize the attitudes of others; passing them on from one individual to the other. Attitudes can be held implicitly and do not innately imply behavior. Often individual’s will have consideration of a ground or opinion but not act on it when the chance rises. Many factors influence whether or not attitudes will come to impact behavior.

Throughout pursuing an undergraduate engineering degree, you will encounter classes nick named, “weed out classes.” Weed out classes are incredibly difficult and strenuous. Hence, it weeds out the non-engineers from the ones who continue to pursue the career regardless of the difficulty, one of those such classes is physics. But, what makes physics so hard and why do students struggle greatly with it? There are multiple reasons, such as: monotonous lectures, difficulty understanding theoretical knowledge, lack of mathematical background, and the method in which physics is taught. This is not a recent problem, a study was done by University of Texas at Austin that showed nearly 42% of students that enrolled in physics either failed or dropped

Attitude - Attitude toward a behavior is referred as an individual’s positive and negative evaluation of a relevant behavior and is composed of an individual’s salient beliefs regarding the perceived consequences of performing behavior (Ajzen, 1991, p.207).

An attitude are the long lasting beliefs, feelings, and behavioral responses towards social objects such as other people or issues (Attitudes and Behavior, n.d.). Attitudes can either be positive or negative.

“Attitudes are positive or negative evaluations, feeling, and tendencies that individuals harbor toward objects or concepts” (Wild). As the book mentions, attitudes are similar to values, these are formed according to a culture background and varies from country to country.

Attitude–a relatively constant feeling, predisposition, or a set of beliefs that is directed toward an object, a person, or a situation.

In addition, attitude is the way we behave and the way we react to daily situations. For example, every one of us has passed through a difficult situation but that does not mean that we are going to put a negative attitude to what we do after that situation because we can influence people around us. For instance, if we got to work with a negative attitude because we got into an argument with someone, that could lead to a bad day for everyone because you are going to let out your frustration against

The word attitude is generally a term used to describe the way we perceive and evaluate the social world around us, the way in which we build a positive or negative

Leon Festinger created the cognitive dissonance theory as an attempt to explain why people desire to have consistency between their behaviors and actions. Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state people feel when they find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold (Festinger, 1957; as cited in Griffin, 2009). Thus, people are motivated to change either their behavior or their belief when feelings of dissonance arise.

The principal assumption of the theory regarding to Hogg and Vaughan (2011, p.214) “is that cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant state of psychological tension generated when a person has two or more cognitions (bits of information) that are inconsistent or do not fit together. So if people at the same time hold those two cognitions (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, states of awareness of behaviour), which are psychologically inconsistent, then we experience dissonance. The theory also accounts for discrepancies between behaviour and attitudes. For instance, when people act in a manner that is inconsistent with their attitudes, then they experience tension. And how people can reduce this tension? Festinger (1957) suggested people have to do it by changing their attitudes so that they are in line with their behavior. The main way of reducing dissonance is attitude change. The theory propose that when we are dealing with two conflicting beliefs then we experience tension or an aversive state and a good example is military training. The military teaches and telling soldiers that when they kill the enemy its nothing wrong and killing them is a good thing but those same soldiers have a deeply natural and inborn belief that “thou shalt not kill”(Sturman, 2012) . Another example is about person who smokes cigarettes. Regarding to Stone and Cooper (2001) most people

Social psychologists know that people’s attitudes define whether they have a successful, bright, happy future. Most people can agree that this is the case, but people must ask themselves why and what really makes up a person’s attitude. In past years, attitude was recognized as one of the most important psychological experiences of human beings. Over time, the significance of attitudes has increased specifically in understanding how people come to be who they are. This paper will discuss the structure of attitudes through the ABC Model which explains three different components (affect, behavior and cognition) and how these components play a role in people’s lives.

Attitude is primarily a genuine desire to learn and the will to do hard academic work to achieve understanding. It is also shown by how well you apply yourself even to subjects in which you have little interest and how much you can achieve even when a teacher’s style is not what you are used to. Also attitude can change the way you percieveperceive things

Attitudes refer to one’s evaluations of the social world: others, objects and ideas. These overall evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral, vary in their extremity and be based on a variety of information (Tesser and Martin, 1996; Petty, Wheeler, and Tormala, 2003 ). A popular conceptualization of the attitude construct, the tripartite theory, holds that there are three primary types of information in which attitudes can be based (Breckler, 1984; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Zanna & Rempel, 1988) : cognitions or beliefs, affect or feelings and actions or behaviour. As defined by Richard Perloff, persuasion is the process which moulds and shapes attitudes. It is through persuasion that changes in attitudes can occur. The two methods

    What I have learned about physics is that this subject is the study of the physical properties that surround us. Physics is how things move and what makes them move. For example, measurements such as velocity and acceleration and how they are used in physics is a major piece of the class. Also, physicists study the forces of gravity, electrical currents, and other numerous forces that hold everything together. Physics is also the study of very large things and very small things. Scientists study the stars, planets, and all other galaxies made up of matter. They also study the smaller pieces of matter such as atoms and electrons. During this year, I have learned the study of sound, light, and waves. We also studied the energy, heat, and radioactivity amongst objects. Physics not only helps us understand how objects move, but also how they change form, go from hot to cold, and what they are made of. One example of what we learned this year is the motion of an object. Motion can be portrayed as using displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, time, and speed. We had focused on the lesson of Newton's first law: an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an outside force.