ABSTRACT
For many adolescent and pre-adolescent learners, science is often perceived as not relevant to their everyday lives (Sjøberg & Schreiner, 2010; Vedder-Weiss & Fortus, 2011; Osborne et al., 2003; Zacharia & Barton, 2004). Ethnographic researchers have found that based on their experiences in- and out-of-school, youths perceive school science as disconnected from disciplinary science (Brickhouse et al., 2000; Zimmerman, 2012). Research based on analysis of attitudinal scales suggests that young people often believe that future science-related careers are undesirable due to negative views of the scientific enterprise (Masnick et al., 2010). Preliminary survey research results from the UK found that even if children desire science careers, obtaining a science-related career is a challenge for many white learners and learners from some ethnic minority backgrounds (Archer et al., 2010). For some children, the loss of interest may not apply equally to all “kinds” of science. By comparing students in kindergarten through third grade to students in tenth through twelfth grade, researchers found that while there was no significant gender difference in the earliest grades, by high school boys increased their interests in physics while girls increased their interests in biology. Other adolescents are not only uninterested in aspects of science, but they also tune out school altogether. For example, nearly 25% of ninth grade learners in the United States do not graduate high school in four years (Chapman et al., 2010) with many young people turning towards alternatives like state-certified high school equivalencies.
