Characterizing children’s spontaneous interests in science and technology

Abstract

This article reports the results of an analysis of 1676 science and technology questions submitted by Israeli children to a series of television programmes. It categorizes the children’s questions with reference to five different coding schemes: field of interest, motivation for asking the question, type of information requested, country‐specific aspects, and source of information. The results point to the popularity of biology, technology, and astrophysics over other sciences, indicate a shift in interests and motivation with age, and reflect a variety of gender‐related differences within the sample. The implications of the findings for some current trends in curriculum development and for informal science education are discussed with reference to the wider context of the pupils’ voice in education.

Acknowledgements

Much of the work on this paper was carried out by Ayelet Baram‐Tsabari as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Professor Edgar Jenkins and Dr Jim Ryder (CSSME, School of Education, Leeds University) for their priceless reviews and valuable comments upon the early drafts of this paper.

Notes

^a Where data are available.

^a Where data are available.

^a Where data are available.

^a Actual numbers in parentheses.

1. Unless otherwise indicated, a two‐tailed Pearson chi‐square test was used to calculate probabilities. Very small groups with expected counts of less than 5 were removed from the analysis. Because of the high number of subcategories, the results represent many times an aggregation of small and similar subcategories. When several series containing a different number of questions are presented on the same scale, the relative number of questions is used in the interest of clarity and comparison. Not all the inquirers provided their full details; therefore, sample sizes differ from graph to graph and are indicated by the ‘n’ values.