The Attitudes of Students with Teachers’ Specialization Towards Psychology Knowledge

A special method has been elaborated to research the students’ attitudes towards Psychology knowledge. Its purpose is to investigate the cognitive representations of Psychology knowledge in students’ mind as a set of their attitudes towards Psychology knowledge. The students were instructed to evaluate the Psychology knowledge with a set of characteristics, which were offered by a researcher. All characteristics were designed as a set of 46 bipolar pairs. A 7 points’ scale was used, where point 1 meant the maximum of the attitude, described on the left side, and point 7 meant maximum of the attitude, described on the right side.

246 students of 3-5 years of study at the University were participants in this investigation. The mean, frequency, and dispersion of students’ scaling of each bipolar pair were scored and analyzed.

The results have shown that students with teachers’ specialization evaluate Psychology knowledge
1) at the very high level as:
perspective, necessary, actual;
2) at the high level as:
applied, interesting, up-to-date, systematic, persuasive, profound, credible, optimistic, flexible, intentionally acquired, learned with understanding, constructed as a whole, authoritative among the people, fundamental, well described, favorite, proved, generalized, realistic, humanitarian, rational, being aware;
3) at the middle level (about point 4) or ambivalent ( with high dispersion) were evaluated such characteristics as: universal, logical, accessible for understanding, politically orientated, empirical, not ordinary, well developed, learning-orientated, objective, steadfast, general, algorithmic, imagery, everyday originated, unique, having the only meaning, metaknowledge, laconic, academic, descriptive, national.

This method gives a possibility to investigate typical and individual features of students’ attitudes towards any particular field of Psychology.