Mid Sweden University

Historically students’ interest in science and technology (S&T) has been researched mostly from a gender and age perspective and on a subject level of analysis. The work presented in this study make use of Swedish quantitative data from a large scale international and comparative research project called “The Relevance of Science Education Second (ROSES) study” to investigate secondary students’ interest in S&T on a content level of analysis. National data were collected by a questionnaire in 2020. By making use of the theoretical development pointed out in the literature the “person-object theory of interest” is used to frame and interpret the results. In this perspective interest is expected to differentiate as interest patterns. Seven such patterns were identified by an explorative factor analysis which points out a direction for future work to investigate students’ interest in S&T with a deepened understanding of how learning S&T is influenced by identity formation. 

The Relevance of Science Education - Second (ROSES) is an international comparative research projectgathering empirical evidence on factors with importance for learning science and technology from astudent point of view. (Jidesjö, Oskarsson, & Westman, 2020; Oskarsson, Westman, & Jidesjö, 2019).ROSES uses a common questionnaire to students containing categories such as S&T content in andoutside school, future job, environmental challenges, social media, and informal S&T experiences.We will present comparisons between students opinion and willingness to engage in Science from awide range of countries. We will further present results from Sweden where a group of studentsbelieves it is important to learn about sustainability and that they can influence what happens. This alsoindicate some agency where students are willing to act as well as willing to sacrifice. Group of studentsin our material shows sign of Science Capital, a feeling of science being for them, (Archer et al 2015).

This study focuses on how students can argue and make decisions about socio-scientific issues that are relevant to their culture or region. The goal of this study is to present these dilemmas at the conference and propose incorporating decision-making about socio-scientific issues into the science education curriculum. The study explores students' skills in SSI argumentation and aims to clarify the relationship between values, knowledge and experiences in their SSI decision-making. Although all the students had access to the same information and agreed on the factual aspects of the issue, they came to different decisions, the difference depending on their background knowledge, values, and experiences. The result of the study found that students weighed the same information differently based on their core values and experiences. The results showed that the use of SSI in science classrooms can promote students' decision-making skills, critical thinking and awareness of different factors that influence SSI issues.