THE EFFECTS OF TEACHING A NEW PHYSICS COURSE ON TEACHER ATTITUDES.

The article discusses the effects of teaching a new physics course on the attitude of teachers. This study was aimed to determine whether the teachers' attitudes changed while teaching the new course discussed in this study. As mentioned in the initial part of this study a group of 36 teachers attended an institute in preparation for teaching a new high school physics course in 1967. For this study thirty six teachers selected from a list of about 17,000 teachers of physics in the United States attended the institute. The attitude test was administered to these teachers in August during the fifth week of the institute. The same instrument was administered to 32 of these teachers in the middle of the February of the following year. These retested teachers constituted the sample for this study. Attitude was measured with an instrument adapted from Osgood's semantic differential technique. The statistical design used in this study was one-way multivariate analysis of variance. The results of this study indicated that the null hypothesis of no overall teacher attitude change towards the student activity variables was rejected.