Studying biology entails negotiating knowledges, identities, and what paths, more or less well-trodden, to follow. Knowledges, identities, and paths within the very practices of science are fundamentally gendered and it is, therefore, critical to recognize when exploring students' learning and participation in natural sciences. Even though…

This study aims to contribute knowledge about obstacles and opportunities for pedagogical continuity in science across early childhood education. We use activity theory to analyse individual interviews and group meetings with teachers from preschool (age 1-5), preschool class (age 6) and grade 1-3 (age 7-9) in three Swedish school units. The…

This study examined how high school students' attitudes toward advanced physics were predicted by their sense of school belonging, and how gender moderated this relationship. The Trends in International Math and Science (TIMSS) 2015 Advanced data, consisting of responses from 12th grade students enrolled in advanced physics courses among nine…

Research on how epistemic beliefs influence students' learning in different contexts is ambiguous. Given this, we have examined the relationships between students' scientific epistemic beliefs, their problem solving, and solutions in a constructionist computer-simulation in classical mechanics. The problem-solving process and performance of 19…

There is an ongoing discussion about what content that should be taught in science education and there are different views among teachers about what represent good science content. However, teachers are not isolated individuals making their own interpretations, but are part of institutionalised systems building on patterns in the selection of…

This article reports on student preschool teachers' views of science and its role in preschool. Three cohorts of students have been given a written questionnaire with open-ended questions before and after a one-semester course including science (specifically Chemistry and Physics) in a 3.5-year preschool teacher programme in Sweden. The science…

The purpose of this study was to explore (a) to what extent male and female science teachers pose different types of questions and (b) if the type of science question posed influences the extent to which boys or girls respond to them. Transcripts of the teacher-student interaction in a whole-class situation were analysed, with attention paid to…

This article portrays the formation of a new problem area within Swedish educational policy in the 1960s, namely the need of scientific manpower and the demands to entice more individuals into studies in science and technology. As a consequence school science was given the mission to be interesting, fun and to change young people's attitudes…

Background: Students' motivation for science declines over the early teenage years, and students often find school science difficult and irrelevant to their everyday lives. This paper asks whether creating opportunities to connect school science to authentic science can have positive effects on student motivation. Purpose: To understand how…

This paper focuses on the views of 16-17-year-old science students from England, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden on whale hunting, and their perceptions of the views of their international counterparts. The students were all provided with the same decision-making task, discussed the issue in small groups and then presented their views on video,…

The phenomenon of women's underrepresentation in engineering is well known. However, the slow progress in achieving better gender equality here compared with other domains has accentuated the "numbers" issue, while the quality aspects have been largely ignored. This study aims to shed light on both these aspects via the lens of mentors,…

With the development of science and technology, a basically optimistic ideology of progress has emerged. This deterministic attitude has been challenged in recent decades as a result of harmful side-effects generated by the way technology and science have been approached and used. The study presented here is a part of a larger international and…

The article builds upon a study where students' relations to science are related to their worldviews and the kind of worldviews they associate with science. The aim of the study is to deepen our knowledge of how worldview and students' ways to handle conflicts between their own worldview and the worldview they associate with science, can add to…

Research suggests that certain common policy presuppositions can be identified regarding teacher education programmes in advanced knowledge-based economies, most notably the relationship between formal education (schooling) and economic production, and the role of teacher education in respect to this relationship. This article draws on the work of…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…