Student’ Attitudes Toward Learning and School – Study of Exploratory Models about the Effects of Socio-demographics and Personal Attributes

The aim of this study was to investigate exploratory models about the effects of factors – students’ gender, contextual background, age and school failures – that may interfere with attitudes toward school, and students’ perceptions about learning , while explicitly modelling the multilevel structure of a large data set from an educational context. Based on a study with Portuguese youngsters (N=778) from regular classes, whom we applied the QATS – Questionnaire of Attitudes Toward School [1][2], we use regression trees algorithm to predict student’ attitudes toward learning and school. Predictors include socio-demographics, personal attributes and some specific characteristics related to school. The results come to reveal the importance of understand attitudes toward school and toward learning, as being affected for different combinations of factors. Attitudes should be understood based on the natures of the subject. Thus the improvement of attitudes and motivation toward school should involve students, teachers, parents and community.