Investigating students’ perception towards economics education / Azniza Ahmad Zaini, Roslilee Abdul Halim and Zulkifli Ab. Ghani Hilmi

This paper investigates the perception and attitudes of non-business
major students in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) towards
economics education and their relationship on students’ academic
performance. One of the key performance indicators in the academic
programme of the university is to achieve less than twenty percent
failures in all subjects offered. A four-semester examination results
revealed that students constantly obtained high failure rate in two
economics introductory subjects. Using students taking these two
economics courses as respondents, dimensions of attitudes towards
economics education were identified through the use of an
exploratory factor analysis. Four factors were extracted from a 26-
item questionnaire identified as ‘Value’, ‘Difficulty’, ‘Cognitive’ and
‘Affective’. Cronbach’s Alpha for the four factors was acceptable.
The findings suggested that there was no significant difference
between male and female students on the four dimensions of attitude
even though the achievement of female students’ was higher than
males. Students who did not perform were found to have a more
negative attitude on the four dimensions of attitude compared to those who performed. Regression of the final exam scores on the
four latent variables obtained from the factor analysis revealed that
subject difficulty and gender, taken together, were significantly
associated with students’ achievement.