STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE STUDY OF ECONOMICS IN NIGERIAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia, “management of a household, administration”) from οἶκος (oikos, “house”) + νόμος (nomos, “custom” or “law”), hence “rules of the house(hold)”. Political economy was the earlier name for the subject, but economists in the late 19th century suggested “economics” as a shorter term for “economic science” that also avoided a narrow political-interest connotation and as similar in form to “mathematics”, “ethics”, and so forth. A focus of the subject is how economic agents analyzes the entire economy and issues affecting
it, including unemployment, inflation, economic growth, and monetary and fiscal policy. Other broad distinctions include those between positive economics (describing “what is”) and normative economics (advocating “what ought to be”);
between economic theory and applied economics dealing with the “institutions-history-social structure nexus”).
Economic analysis may be applied throughout society, as in religion social institutions, war, and science. At the
turn of the 21st century, the expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism. An attitude may be defined as a predisposition to respond in a favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given attitude object (Oskamp and Schultz 2005). The focus of this project is on school students’ attitudes towards Economics subjects taught in secondary classrooms. The term ‘subjects’ refers to both theory and laboratory classes in secondary school. Thus, the scope of the present study was limited to Economics as experienced by students
in secondarys chool rather than out-of-school experiences obtained from external sources such as the media, museums, field trips and friends. Attitude towards Economics or science denotes interests or feelings towards studying Economics or science. It is the students’ disposition towards like or ‘dislike’ science while attitude in science means scientific approach assumed by an individual for solving problems, assessing ideas and making decisions. Student beliefs and attitudes have the potential to either facilitate or inhibit learning (Yara, 2009).Many factors could contribute to student’s attitude toward studying science (Economics). Several studies (including Wilson 1983; Soyibo, 1985;Berg 2005; Adesoji, 2008) report that students’ positive attitudes to science correlate highly with their that, in general, the attitude of Nigeria students towards the basic sciences tend to decrease in the order, Biology, Economics,
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.