New Perspectives in Science Education

Science might not always be popular among secondary school students, according to Hofstein et al., (2011); and Stuckey et al. (2013), one reason for this that has been mentioned quite often is that young people claim that science is not relevant to their lives (Aschbacher et al., 2010, Stuckey et al., 2013). As a result, all eyes have been directed towards the science teachers. Science teachers are expected to make school science more relevant to their students’ lives (Holbrook and Rannikmae, 2009). Lacour and Tissington (2011) state that teachers must work harder to comprehend students’ backgrounds and establish links between their homes and their schools. Teachers are thus always the first to be advised to change, while students appear to be the last to be considered and involved. In this study we did the opposite, we shed the light on the students, and we explored the young people’s unspoken views about what science means to them. This was done by combining the cultural model theory lens with visual methods. We found that young people have a positive cultural models and views about science. This positive view towards science has led us to speculate whether young people might not be interested in science and view it as boring because they see the link between themselves and science as vague. The study will advise techniques for teachers and curriculum developers to pay more attention to students’ backgrounds and views, and to design scientific instructional methods that better meet students’ needs for a meaningful experience and a real engagement with science.

Reference

ASCHBACHER & ROTH. (2010). Is science me? High school students' identities, participation and aspirations in science, engineering, and medicine. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: The Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 47, 564-582.

Dillon, Justin. (2016). On Scientific Literacy and Curriculum Reform. Towards a Convergence Between Science and Environmental Education: The Selected Works of Justin Dillon, 269.

Gilbert, John K. (2006). On the nature of “context” in chemical education. International Journal of Science Education, 28(9), 957-976.

Holbrook, Jack, & Rannikmae, Miia. (2009). The meaning of scientific literacy. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 4(3), 275-288.

HOFSTEIN, A., EILKS, I. & BYBEE, R. 2011. Societal issues and their importance for contemporary science education—a pedagogical justification and the state-of-the-art in Israel, Germany, and the USA. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 9, 1459-1483.

LACOUR, M. & TISSINGTON, L. D. 2011. The effects of poverty on academic achievement. Educational Research and Reviews, 6, 522-527. 

Stuckey, Marc, Hofstein, Avi, Mamlok-Naaman, Rachel, & Eilks, Ingo. (2013). The meaning of ‘relevance’in science education and its implications for the science curriculum. Studies in Science Education, 49(1), 1-34.