Comparison of Attitudes towards the Nature of Science among Students of Tabriz University and Tabriz University of Medical Sciences

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 MSc, Department of Education, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

2 Professor, Department of Education, Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran

10.22034/cipj.2025.66729.1255

Abstract

Objective: This research was conducted with the aim of comparing attitudes toward the nature of science among students of the University of Tabriz and Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.
Method: The research was applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey in terms of nature. The statistical population included 21,801 students from the University of Tabriz and 5,200 students from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, from which a sample of 377 from the University of Tabriz and 357 from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences were seslected using the Krejcie and Morgan table through stratified random sampling. The research instrument was the Kaya et al. (2019) questionnaire on attitudes toward the nature of science, whose validity was confirmed by experts and reliability was calculated with Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.838. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (ANOVA test) in SPSS27 software.
Results: The research results indicate a significant superiority in the attitudes of humanities students compared to other disciplines in most dimensions: in the cognitive-epistemological dimension, compared to medical sciences and agriculture; in the social-institutional dimension, compared to technical-engineering, agriculture, and medicine; in the educational-pedagogical dimension, compared to basic sciences, technical-engineering, agriculture, and medicine; and in overall attitude, compared to technical-engineering, agriculture, and medicine. Additionally, basic sciences students had higher attitudes in the social-institutional dimension compared to technical-engineering, agriculture, and medicine, and in overall attitude compared to agriculture. In the same dimension, agriculture also showed superiority over medical sciences.
Conclusion: Based on the obtained results, the relative superiority of attitudes in humanities disciplines is evident, which this inconsistency mainly returns to structural differences in curricula and educational methods.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 13 April 2025
  • Revise Date: 05 July 2025
  • Accept Date: 17 July 2025
  • First Publish Date: 20 February 2026
  • Publish Date: 20 February 2026

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