Science Learning in Everyday Life

Interest is a powerful motivator; nonetheless, science educators often lack the necessary information to make use of the power of student-specific interests in the reform process of science curricula. This study suggests a novel methodology, which might be helpful in identifying such interests—using children’s self-generated questions as an indication of their scientific interests. In this research, children’s interests were measured by analyzing 1555 science-related questions submitted to an international Ask-A-Scientist Internet site. The analysis indicated that the popularity of certain topics varies with age and gender. Significant differences were found between children’s spontaneous (intrinsically motivated) and school-related (extrinsically motivated) interests. Surprisingly, girls contributed most of the questions to the sample; however, the number of American girls Correspondence to: Anat Yarden; e-mail: [email protected] C © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 2 BARAM-TSABARI ET AL. dropped upon entering senior high school. We also found significant differences between girls’ and boys’ interests, with girls generally preferring biological topics. The two genders kept to their stereotypic fields of interest, in both their school-related and spontaneous questions. Children’s science interests, as inferred from questions to Web sites, could ultimately inform classroom science teaching. This methodology extends the context in which children’s interests can be investigated. C © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed , 1–24, 2006 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The Glenn report Before It’s Too Late (The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century, 2000) states that “we are failing to capture the interest of youth for scientific and mathematical ideas.” Indeed, many students find standard science curricula largely out of touch with their personal interests, a factor which contributes to the low number of students pursuing advanced science and mathematics courses in high school, and going on to choose scientific careers (Millar & Osborne, 1998). Adolescents’ decisions about the contents and directions of their educational training have been found to be influenced to a high degree by the topic-related interests they developed in the preceding years (Krapp, 2000). Organizations, including the National Research Council (1996) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1993), have proposed that science curricula taught at a secondary-school level should provide a common basis of knowledge while addressing the particular needs and interests of students. However, educators lack the necessary information and tools to guide modifications that could make use of the power of student-specific interests in improving those students’ individualized learning and competency in scientific subjects. The issue of students’ interests may also be viewed in the context of the pupil’s voice in the education movement (Burke & Grosvenor, 2003; Economic and Social Research Council, 2004; Mirta, 2004; Whitehead & Clough, 2004). Until recently, the pupil’s voice had been marginalized or neglected by educational researchers. The student was regarded as an object of study but not as someone who could make an informed judgment on what should be taught in school science courses (Jenkins & Nelson, 2005). Lloyd-Smith and Tarr (2000) have called for the educational system, as frontline providers for children, to model, for other professionals, a real process of acknowledging and valuing young people’s views and opinions. Similarly, Rudduck and Flutter (2000) regard it as strange that, in a climate that privileges the consumer, pupils in school have not been considered consumers worth consulting. Interest is a powerful motivator (Deci, 1992), which differs from most other motivational concepts by its content specificity (Krapp, 2002). Interest refers to a differential likelihood of investing energy in one set of stimuli rather than another (Csikszentmihalyi & Hermanson, 1995). Research indicates positive relationships between individual interest and a wide range of indicators of learning (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002; Schiefele, 1998). However, the potential benefits of interest have been largely ignored in school reform: students rarely learn out of interest, and they usually lose interest during learning (Prenzel, 1998), with the consequence that bored and unengaged students are also less likely to learn (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). A number of studies have explored students’ scientific interests by inviting them to respond to questionnaires (Dawson, 2000; Qualter, 1993; Sjøberg, 2000; Sjøberg & Schreiner, 2002; Stark & Gray, 1999), participate in focus groups (Osborne & Collins, 2000, 2001), or respond to a student-led review of the science curriculum (Murray & Reiss, 2005). These techniques have identified age-, gender-, and subject-specific issues impacting students’ general interests in specific subjects, including a significant decline in interest in physics, Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce IDENTIFYING STUDENTS’ SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS 3 chemistry, and mathematics that occurs as the students’ progress in grade level. This decline is particularly evident as students enter high school, and is especially pronounced for girls (Krapp, 2002). The gender-related aspects of the interest theory for science education are that boys in general have greater interest in science than girls (Gardner, 1975 1998), and while physics proves significantly less interesting to girls than to boys, biology is of greater interest to girls (Dawson, 2000; Friedler & Tamir, 1990; Jones, Howe, & Rua, 2000; Sjøberg, 2000; Stark & Gray, 1999; Zohar, 2003). Within the field of biology, high school girls were shown to display greater interest in human biology than boys, in both Israel (Tamir & Gardner, 1989) and England (Taber, 1991). The relevance of science education (ROSE) studies conducted in England and Denmark found that girls’ interest was focused on health, medicine, and the body, whereas boys wished to learn more about the dramatic aspects of physics and chemistry, and how technology works (Busch, 2005; Jenkins & Nelson, 2005). Moreover, subject-matter related interests have a greater influence on boys’ grades than girls’ (Schiefele, Krapp, & Winteler, 1992). The questionnaire-based methods usually used to explore students’ scientific interests have traditionally relied on adult-centric views of what subjects should be meaningful for students. To overcome this inherent bias, we developed a naturalistic approach to defining students’ specific concerns by using children’s self-generated questions as an indication of their scientific interests. Posing questions is an important part of scientific inquiry (National Research Council, 1996). Self-generated questions can help reveal the asker’s reasoning, alternative views, and interests (Biddulph, Symington, & Osborne, 1986). Studying students’ questions can give teachers an awareness of what students are interested in and what they want to know about a given topic (Chin & Chia, 2004). The best known and most often used way of classifying students’ questions according to their cognitive level is the hierarchical Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956), which suggests classifying questions into low-order (knowledge, comprehension, application) and high-order (analysis, synthesis, evaluation) questions. A simpler evaluation involves distinguishing among input questions—those which require recalling knowledge, processing questions—which require linking pieces of information, and output questions—which require hypothesizing, generalizing, and criticizing (Shepardson & Pizzini, 1991). Graesser, Person, and Huber (1992) proposed analyzing a question according to the hierarchical content of the information requested, with deep-reasoning questions being highly correlated with the deeper levels of cognition in Bloom’s taxonomy. MarbachAd and Sokolove (2000) classified students’ questions into eight categories, the highest one being a research hypothesis. Another taxonomy of questions distinguishes between “confirmation questions,” and the higher quality “transformation questions,” which signal the restructuring or reorganization of students’ understanding (Pedrosa de Jesus, Teixeira-Dias, & Watts, 2003). Students rarely ask questions in the classroom, and when they do, only a very small subset of their questions evidence genuine intellectual curiosity (Dillon, 1988; Graesser & Person, 1994; Marbach-Ad & Sokolove, 2000; Pedrosa de Jesus et al., 2003; Rop, 2003; White & Gunstone, 1992). The overall paucity of student questioning is attributed to the classroom atmosphere, where revealing a misunderstanding renders the student vulnerable, open to embarrassment, censure or ridicule (Pedrosa de Jesus et al., 2003). Students described their teachers’ response to their questions as “put-offish” or even annoyed, and their classmates’ reactions as intolerant (Rop, 2003). Learners usually ask questions where they feel secure (Watts, Gould, & Alsop, 1997). We therefore looked for self-generated questions in free-choice science-learning environments. Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce 4 BARAM-TSABARI ET AL. Examining free-choice science-learning environments can provide knowledge about the natural setting in which people learn in a self-directed, self-motivated, voluntary way, guided by individual needs and interests (Falk & Dierking, 2002), and has much to offer to formal education (Walter & Westbrook, 2001). An example of such a free-choice setting is the Web, which can be seen as a site for student inquiry in science, which allows students to pursue questions of personal interest (Wallace, Kupperman, Krajcik, & Soloway, 2000). Research on children’s use of the World Wide Web for learning has generally been conducted in school settings. In the fall of 2003, nearly all of the public schools in the United States had access to the Internet (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005). Students reported regularly accessing science sites to get help with school assignments (Weigold & Treise, 2004). Nevertheless, although they exhibit positive attitudes and selfconfidence (Fidel et al., 1999; Lumpe & Bulter, 2002; Watson, 2004), children have difficulty formulating and modifying search queries (Bilal, 2004; Hirsh, 1999; MaKinster, Beghetto, & Plucker, 2002; Wallace et al., 2000). Furthermore, children do not tend to question the accuracy of the information they find on the Web (Hirsh, 1999; Schacter, Chung, & Dorr, 1998; Wallace et al., 2000). Students using the Web are often overwhelmed by the amount of information available (MaKinster et al., 2002). An effective search is also an exercise in inquiry and critical thinking (Brem & Boyes, 2000). Most students fail to construct an accurate and broad understanding following an online inquiry (Hoffman & Krajcik, 1999). However, a deficiency in students’ skills is not always to blame: Keating, MaKinster, Mills, and Nowak (1999) found that only 30% of the search results they received actually contained at least a short operational definition or graphic display of the science concept they were searching for, and many of the sites contained misconceptions. Sometimes, when children are trying to find complex answers on the Web, they need people who have the answers, rather than a list of directories or sites. These human-mediated question-and-answer services are sometimes referred to as “Ask-A” services, such as “Ask a Scientist” (Lankes, 1999) or “Expert Services” (Janes, Hill, & Rolfe, 2001). These digital reference services allow one to send questions that interrogate a collective cranium of experts versed in a variety of disciplines (Parslow & Wood, 1998). They are oriented to matching the asker with people having the expertise to answer his/her questions, not just to matching an information need to a textual source with the information (White, 1999). The mode of communication is asynchronous electronic communication. Usually, such sites maintain searchable public archives in which previously answered questions are returned as search results, thus making this archive a resource for their users (Pomerantz, Nicholson, Belanger, & Lankes, 2004). In this research, we used children’s questions asked under free-choice conditions to identify their scientific interests. Using a similar methodology, we were previously able to characterize Israeli students’ interests in science and technology (Baram-Tsabari & Yarden, 2005). The ability to identify students’ interests in science may play an important role in improving existing curricula to meet their needs. This study aims to assist science educators, teachers, and curriculum developers in identifying such student interests using a novel methodology.