ABSTRACT

There is an uneasy relationship between science and the public in many Western cultures. We are drawn to its amazing discoveries – black holes, the human genome – and appreciate the many benefits science and technology provide in our everyday lives, but we are turned off by its seemingly cold logic and impersonal nature. With its insistence on evidence and rational thought, science seems to try and explain away all the mystery in our universe. We are distrustful of its lack of human emotion, and tend to blame scientists for many of the things that have gone wrong in our world: pollution, nuclear weapons, ‘Frankenstein foods’, ‘superbugs’, etc. If only they had ‘switched their feelings on’ when they were splitting the atom or engineering the genes of our crops, surely we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now? Of course, this is a gross caricature of science and scientists, but unfortunately it seems to be the view that many of us have come away with from our school science education and subsequent exposure to the media. Working with successive cohorts of primary student teachers, I have repeatedly come up against negative attitudes towards science, many of which stem directly from students’ experience in their own science education. Typically, my student teachers tend not to remember very much about their primary science education (unfortunately!) but often have vivid tales of crushing experiences in secondary science laboratories, where they have received the impression that science is hard, boring and irrelevant to their lives. I need to note here that there are many inspiring secondary teachers of science and that the secondary science curriculum has undergone many changes over the last decade to make it more human and personal. Nevertheless, there is evidence stretching back over many years that children’s positive attitudes to science decline as they get older, and that this is related to the types of science courses they experience and the science self-concept they develop as part of these courses (George 2000).