Third Grade High School Student's Attitudes towards the course " Religion and Life"

This survey aimed at investigating the third grade high school student's attitudes towards the course of “Religion and Life” in Neyshabour city, Iran. Among all the third grade high school students of both genders studying in the fields of Sciences and/or Humanities during the academic year of 2010-2011, about 323 students were randomly selected through stratified sampling. They completed 3 related questionnaires. The Attitude towards Religion and Life course Questionnaire had 3 components: importance, attractiveness and understanding of the subject matter. The results indicated that the participants had relatively positive attitudes towards the attractiveness, importance and understanding of the course. According to the t-test results there was a significant difference between male and female students with females having relatively negative attitudes toward the subject matter in understanding and importance components. No significant difference, however, was found between them with regards to the importance component. Considering the effect of student's socio-economical status on their attitudes, the wealthy ones had relatively negative attitudes in the component of attractiveness, and the poor ones had relatively negative attitudes in the component of understanding, respectively. There was no significant difference between these two groups in the importance component. Regarding the effect of the study field on the participants’ attitudes, there was no significant difference between the students of the two fields in the components of importance and understanding, but those studying in the science field had relatively negative attitudes in attractiveness component. According to the results of Pearson correlation, the relationship between the attitude to the teacher and religious identity and the attitude to the course was positive. There was no relationship between the participant's mean scores and their attitudes to the course. The results of regression analysis showed that:1) in the attractiveness component, the higher effects belonged to the religious identity, attitudes to the teacher and gender respectively,2) in the importance component, the higher effects belonged to the religious identity and attitudes to the teacher, and3) in the understanding component, the higher effects belonged to the attitudes to the teacher, gender, religious identity and socio-economic status.