Exploring a ROSE garden : Norwegian youth's orientations towards science : seen as signs of late modern identities

Abstract

The thesis is based on the view that science teaching must build on an understanding of the students' culture, priorities and concerns. The empirical material is collected through the ROSE project. ROSE (The Relevance of Science Education) is a comparative project meant to shed light on affective factors of importance to the learning of science and technology. The target population is students towards the end of lower secondary school (age 15). The research instrument was developed in cooperation with an international group of science educators. The resulting questionnaire consisted mostly of closed questions addressing the students' interests, attitudes, plans, views on the environmental challenges, etc. This thesis uses data from more than 26 000 students in 25 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.<br> The research aims were to develop a student typology based on the Norwegian data, to characterise the student types' orientations towards science, and to study Norwegian youth's interests against a background of students from less modernised countries. The results can be summarised under three main conclusions:<br> - Norwegian students can be divided into five student types with distinct orientations towards science.<br> - Students' interests in science are sex-specific.<br> - There are some characteristic cross-national patterns in youth's interests that follow a modern–traditional divide.<br> The results are discussed in the light of sociological theories on youth in late modern societies, especially by drawing on perspectives on the late modern project of identity construction. The students' responses in the questionnaire are interpreted as identity expressions, and the typology is seen as signs of five different social identities.<br> The study has an explorative and data-driven approach. The next step of the analysis has been successively adjusted according to the previous step and results. The following is a brief account for the way through the data material and a summary of the results