Interest in Science: A Comparative Analysis of the Aims of School Science Syllabi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is currently worldwide concern about the decline in students’ interest in science. The purpose of this paper is to examine school science curriculum documents to determine whether they explicitly state that they aim to enhance student interest in science. A document analysis was used to compare science syllabi from Canada, Finland, Sweden, UK, USA, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, the Eastern Caribbean states, and Hungary. It was found that about half of these countries did have an explicit aim of enhancing student interest in science at high school level. The remainder either did not have any such aim, or had a partial or implied expectation. These findings were then compared to the results of the international PISA 2006 survey of student interest in science. It was found that those countries in which science curriculum documents made no mention about enhancing student interest (Canada and UK) were below the OECD average for interest in science. However, there were other countries below the OECD average, that did have a curriculum aim to enhance student interest in science. It is concluded that having a stated aim to enhance student interest in science is not enough, by itself, to bring that aim to fruition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".