ATTITUDES TOWARDS RESEARCH OF TEACHER EDUCATION STUDENTS AT PALAWAN STATE UNIVERSITY – PUERTO PRINCESA

Palawan State University – Puerto Princesa (PSU) is one of the biggest teacher education institutions in Palawan, Philippines. With the ultimate goal of enhancing the research competence of its teacher education students, this cross-sectional explanatory study sought to determine the attitudes towards research of its teacher education students and determine how their attitude factors might vary across demographic variables gender, year level, program of study, and type of high school curriculum. The Attitudes towards Research (ATR) Scale developed by Papanastasiou (2005) was adopted to determine the attitudes of 397 teacher education students enrolled at PSU during the first semester of School Year 2019-2020. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) were used for data analyses. Results revealed that PSU teacher education students have a relatively positive attitude towards research and perceive research as useful for their profession and relevant to their lives. However, most of them experienced difficulty and anxiety in research. These attitudes of PSU teacher education students towards research do not significantly vary across gender, program of study, year level, and type of high school curriculum. It is recommended that the results of this study be considered when planning instruction or conducting intervention programs that will improve students' attitudes towards research. Factors influencing students' attitudes towards research and how their attitudes could be improved should also be explored.