Spanish teaching students’ attitudes towards teaching science at the pre-school level

Department of Didactics of Experimental Sciences, Faculty of Education Sciences, University of Granada, E-18071 Granada, Spain DP Sciences, Editorial Department, 91944 Les Ulis Cedex A, France

^a Corresponding author: pjtejada@ugr.es

Abstract

Previous researches on early childhood teachers´ attitudes toward science teaching reveals that they feel anxiety and fear regarding science classes. Sometimes, teaching students´ experience with science have a significant influence on their attitude toward science and science teaching. This prior experience has been frequently joined to remember abstract concepts, and it determine what they guess about science teaching in early childhood. In order to assess teacher trainee´s pre-existing attitudes and beliefs toward science teaching in early years, we used a preschool teachers’ attitudes and beliefs toward science teaching questionnaire developed and validated for Maier, Greenfield and Bulotsky-Shearer (2013). Aspects such as science knowledge or ability to create sciencerelated activities, at the beginning, are very poorly valued by future teachers of early childhood education. The main reason is the poor knowledge that they have about science in general. We can conclude that it is important that future teachers of early childhood education should understand importance to teach science to children.