Table 1.
Approaches to the teaching of science.
Fig 1.
Literature search process.
Table 2.
Approaches to interventions on middle school students’ attitudes towards science.
Fig 2.
The figure displays the number of publications from 2013 to 2023. A notable increase in recent years, particularly in 2022, suggesting growing academic interest in this topic.
Table 3.
Number of publications per continent.
Fig 3.
Distribution of the publication per country.
Countries are color-coded according to the number of publications, with darker shades representing a higher number of publications. The scale at the bottom ranges from 1 to 14 publications, with the highest concentration observed in Turkey. Following Turkey, the USA and Rwanda appear in lighter shades. We acknowledge the use of MapChart (https://www.mapchart.net) for creating Fig 3 in this article under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Fig 4.
The pie charts presents the distribution of research designs reported by the main authors of the studies. This distribution highlights the preference for quantitative approaches in the field.
Table 4.
Research methods.
Table 5.
Factors influencing the attitudes of students in the context of an educational intervention.
Table 6.
Definition of the construct under study.
Fig 5.
Focus on the construct or concept of interest.
The main constructs addressed in the studies include: attitudes toward science in general (ATSCG), attitudes toward a science course (ATSCC), attitudes toward a science discipline (ATSCD), attitudes toward a particular topic (ATPT), and constructs that do not fall into any of the mentioned categories (Other).
Fig 6.
The origin of the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the construct of interest.
Source of theoretical-conceptual support for the attitude constructs of interest. This figure illustrates the origins of the references used for each attitude construct mentioned in the reviewed studies. The constructs include attitudes toward science in general (ATSCG), attitudes toward a science course (ATSCC), attitudes toward a science discipline (ATSCD), and constructs that do not fall into any of the mentioned categories (Other). Total references per construct are also displayed.