Exploring the attitudes of secondary school chemistry trainee teachers

This article reports the first part of the research done to explore the attitudes of graduate scientists involved in a UK government initiative to increase the number of chemistry teachers in secondary schools in England and Wales. The graduates were training to be chemistry teachers at the University of East London (UEL). The work uses two well-documented instruments to explore the attitudes of trainees to the subject of chemistry and chemists. It compares and analyses results; the work was done with a small number of trainee teachers over several years. It highlights some issues and inconsistencies in the attitudes of graduates through a possible mismatch between the instruments