Gifted Students’ Knowledge and Motivation Towards Learning Chemistry: A Case Study at Pusat GENIUS@pintar Negara, Malaysia

Abstract

Nowadays, there are increasing calls for teaching and learning of STEM related field. However, learning of STEM subject, focusing on chemistry at younger age is found to be a challenge among the students. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate gifted and talented students’ knowledge and motivation towards learning chemistry subject.  A total of 71 gifted and talented students, taking chemistry at the age of 12 to 13 years old at Pusat GENIUS@pintar Negara, University Kebangsaan Malaysia were involved in this study. A survey questionnaire was utilized in this study and the instrument employed was Attitude toward Chemistry Lesson Scale and Glynn’s motivation model. The collected data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 21 involving descriptive and inferential statistics. The result revealed that the students perceived chemistry playing a vital role in many aspects of everyday life. There was no significant difference in the mean of student’s knowledge and motivation towards chemistry learning scores for male and female students. The result of the study also indicates that students’ knowledge and career motivation has a moderately positive correlation with the highest correlation value. This paper is instrumental in assisting educators to enhance students’ knowledge and motivation towards chemistry learning. Therefore, the role of educators is important to bring about changes in terms of knowledge and motivation towards chemistry teaching and learning processes.