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Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 6, Issue 2, Foreword
(Dec.,
2005) Svein SJØBERG & Camilla SCHREINER How do learners in different cultures relate to science and technology?
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Asia-Pacific
Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 6, Issue 2, Foreword
(Dec.,
2005) Svein SJØBERG & Camilla SCHREINER How do learners in different cultures relate to science and technology?
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It is in the nature of quantitative research to compare groups of students rather than individuals. In such studies, students are categorised according to, for example, sex, age, socioeconomic status of the home,religion, race, language, school type and urban/rural place of living. All research based on groups of respondents entails a loss of information at the level of the individual. This means that quantitative data facilitates characteristics of the typical – but inevitably at the expense of the particular. In the present study, too, groups of respondents will be the unit of the research. The individuals are categorised into gender categories. Characteristics of girls and boys, represented by mean scores for all students of the same gender, will unavoidably do injustice to the individuals. The focus of this study is on the typical, rather than on the particular. Thus, this injustice is a compromise that the study will make.
We will report some results from analysis of the ROSE material. Here, our focus will be on students in Asian countries, but in order to understand these young people better, they will be studied against a background of youth from other continents and cultures. Therefore, we will also report on data collected in other countries. All diagrams show mean scores for 14-16 years old girls and boys from a number of countries in the ROSE sample. The countries are sorted partly geographically, with neighbouring countries together; and partly by level of development, with more modernised countries in the bottom.
The participating researchers in different countries were requested to apply random sampling methods. For various reasons, e.g. due to limited financial resources, some countries have not been able to comply with the request. This means that not all of the 40 participating countries have samples that without reservation can be regarded as representative for 15 years old students in the country5. In some diagrams in this article, results from a single country may differ from the general pattern in the diagram. Here, we will not discuss whether such peculiarities might have been caused by errors in the measurement, the coding, the translation, etc., or by particular cultural-, political- or school-related issues.
The Likert scales have four response categories, and the response categories vary from one question to another. Questions A, C and E have the heading: What I want to learn about. The questions are inventories of possible topics to learn about, each with a 4-point Likert scale. The extreme categories in the Likert scale are labelled Not interested (coded 1) and Very interested (coded 4). It is a rather lengthy question with a total of 108 items. In order to avoid fatigue from the students, the items were grouped into three questions: question A, C and E; from now referred to as question ACE.
Other questions have a list of statements, and the students were asked to indicate in a 4-point Likert scale whether they Disagree (coded 1) or Agree (coded 4). This means that the value 2.5 lies in the middle of the scale. We will in the following interpret average scores of 2.5 as the students in the country in average are neutral to the statement; that they neither agree nor disagree.
5National reports on how the survey was organised in each country are available from the ROSE website http://www.ils.uio.no/forskning/rose/
Copyright (C) 2005 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 6, Issue 2, Foreword (Dec., 2005). All Rights Reserved.
