Asking scientists: A decade of questions analyzed by age, gender, and country

Abstract

Nearly 79,000 questions sent to an Internet-based Ask-A-Scientist site during the last decade were analyzed according to the surfer's age, gender, country of origin, and the year the question was sent. The sample demonstrated a surprising dominance of female contributions among K-12 students (although this dominance did not carry over to the full sample), where offline situations are commonly characterized by males' greater interest in science. This female enthusiasm was observed in different countries, and had no correlation to the level of gender equity in those countries. This suggests that the

Identifying Students' Interests in Biology Using a Decade of Self-Generated Questions

“…For example, interest in medicine increased with age (Figure 2), while interest in zoology decreased as students matured (Figure 3). This trend is in agreement with the known pattern of increased interest in human biology and decreased interest in zoology with age, which had been previously identified in several Ask-AScientist sites (Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2006;Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2009;Baram-Tsabari & Yarden, 2005).…”

“…However, the listed topics are based on adult-centric views of what subjects should be meaningful to the students. To overcome this problem, a naturalistic method was developed for using students' self-generated questions as a source of information about their interests (Baram-Tsabari & Kaadni, 2009;Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2006;Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2009;Baram-Tsabari & Yarden, 2005, 2007BaramTsabari & Yarden, 2009;Cakmakci, Sevindik, Pektas, Uysal, Kole, & Kavak, 2009;Falchetti, Caravita, & Sperduti, 2007;Yerdelen-Damar & Eryılmaz, 2009). By studying students' questions, one can learn about what students are interested in and what they want to know about a given topic (Biddulph, Symington, & Osborne, 1986;Chin & Chia, 2004).…”

“…Almost 79,000 of the surfers disclosed their grade level, country of origin, and filled in the name and subject fields. An analysis of all of the questions in this sample is reported in another paper (Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2009). This study reports a more comprehensive analysis of questions allocated to the biological topics.…”

“…Although web-based experiments of the kind used here are more difficult to control than are experiments conducted in formal setting, they present an important methodological advantage for studying interest-driven science learning, taking into consideration that this kind and amount of data does not exist anywhere outside the web (Baram-Tsabari, Sethi, Bry, & Yarden, 2009). Other limitations, however, are not exclusively related to the data collection approach used in this study, but rather to its pedagogical implications.…”

Science Lives: School choices and ‘natural tendencies’

“…Bennett and Hogarth (2008) maintain that girls exhibit greater negative attitude towards school science and out-of-school science as compared to boys aged 12, which increases further throughout secondary schooling. One suggestion is that this reflects post-materialistic values and the 'latemodern identity' (Schreiner, 2006) of young women in developed countries, where girls tend to accentuate their femininity (Baram-Tsabari, 2009), in contrast to those in developing countries who view science as important for improving the quality of life. While girls at secondary school outperform boys, in the UK many more boys than girls choose physical sciences and engineering related at pre-university level (Department for Business Innovations and Skills, 2011).…”