Physics Teacher Mastery of Subject Matter and Students Attitudes Towards Physics in Secondary Schools in South West Region of Cameroon

The main of this study was to investigate how students' negative attitudes towards physics can be changed by teacher mastery of subject matter. That is, the study was based on the framework that, teacher effectiveness can change physics students' negative attitudes to positive. The sample of the study was made up of 1800 from a population of 4220 physics students of form three. This study was carried out in sixteen secondary schools in the South West Region of Cameroon. To select schools for this study, stratified random sampling technique was employed. Simple random sampling technique was used to select the students. A questionnaire was designed and the reliability verified using statistical package for social sciences SPSS . The reliability coefficient of the questionnaire for student evaluation of teacher effectiveness had a cronbach alpha of 0.84. The quantitative data collected were subjected to both descriptive and inferential statistics. The data collected were analyzed descriptively using frequencies and percentages. Inferentially, the data were analyzed using chi squared test of independence. The main finding of this study was that teacher in-depth understanding of subject matter can change students' negative attitude towards physics to positive. The conclusion was that, effective teacher mastery of the content can change students' negative attitudes towards physics to positive. Awandia Joseph Tazitabong "Physics Teacher Mastery of Subject Matter and Students Attitudes Towards Physics in Secondary Schools in South West Region of Cameroon" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-3 | Issue-1 , December 2018, URL: http://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd20206.pdf http://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/education/20206/physics-teacher-mastery-of-subject-matter-and-students-attitudes-towards-physics-in-secondary-schools-in-south-west-region-of-cameroon/awandia-joseph-tazitabong