Developing an attitude scale for the life science course and students' attitudes and opinions about life science course

This study intends to develop a scale for identifying the students' level of attitude towards the life science lesson; by using the scale to determine the students' level of attitude with respect to various variables; and to find out the primary school grade 2 and 3 students' attitudes towards life science lesson. This study mainly uses the "Descriptive research" method and the data in it are collected through quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study involved respectively four and one working groups. The working groups in the quantitative aspect consist of 355 (AFA), 264 (CFA), 61 (test, re-test) and 290 (attitude identification) students. 58 students were involved in the qualitative aspect. The data are analyzed with SPSS 22.00, Lisrel and MAXQDA software. The results of the analyzed data are as follows: 1. The exploratory factor analysis suggests that the scale that has been developed accounts for 46,30% of the total variance and each factor has 2% Eigen value, and also each factor accounts for minimum 14% of the total variance, each factor is represented with five articles, and it has 16 questions and a three-factor structure. 2. Three factors are correlative with each other and the Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient is .81. 3. The test-re-test results of the attitude scale prove the scale is reliable. 4. The factors in the attitude scale are as follows: "negative attitudes towards the life science lesson", "positive attitudes towards the life science lesson", "positive attitudes towards the content of the life science lesson". 5. According to the CFA, the scale's overall Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient is .88. 6. Five of the CFA data of the life science lesson attitude scale are acceptable and 6 are excellent. 7. It is also seen that primary school grade 2 and 3 students' attitude towards life science lesson is high; their attitude is not influenced by gender, parents' educational background and professions; and from a grade level point of view the 3rd grade students' attitude is significantly higher compared to the 2nd grade students. 8. 2nd and 3rd grade students defined the life science lesson as: 'a nice lesson', a lesson I like, a funny lesson, a lesson related with the life, a lesson teaching the history (past), a lesson related with the daily life, a lesson teaching about Atatürk, a lesson teaching the traffic rules, a lesson teaching how to use the technology, a lesson during which you learn lots of things, a difficult lesson, an important lesson and an unnecessary lesson. 9. During the life science lesson, the 2nd and 3rd grade students want to learn new things in science, social sciences, thoughts and values, life, daily life, and things and wares.