Abstract
Finland’s educational prowess, though tempered by recent international assessments, has remained intact. This report focused on lessons that could be learned regarding secondary-level science education from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, science-focused assessment. That PISA iteration included not only science literacy but also students’ science dispositions (epistemology, enjoyment, interest, and self-efficacy) and the schools’ science climate measures (disciplinary climate and teaching support). Due to the hierarchical nature of the PISA data, multilevel models were employed in this Finnish study, involving 5582 students from 167 schools. Science dispositions (as outcome measures) were differently associated with teaching support and disciplinary climate (epistemology with neither; enjoyment and interest, with both). Science literacy (as an outcome measure) was associated with all four science dispositions, whether modeled with each science disposition separately or all four simultaneously. Science literacy was also associated with the disciplinary climate in science classes for all tested models. We concluded that, in the Finnish context, science dispositions and the disciplinary climate were predictive of science literacy. Furthermore, we presented evidence from the literature indicating that these conclusions may well extend to other international contexts.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-15-2021
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413857
Related Content
Data utilized in these analyses are available for free download from OECD at the following link: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/2015database/ (accessed on 15 October 2021).
Repository Citation
Grabau, Larry J.; Levonen, Jari; and Juuti, Kalle, "Finland, A Package Deal: Disciplinary Climate in Science Classes, Science Dispositions and Science Literacy" (2021). Plant and Soil Sciences Faculty Publications. 171.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/pss_facpub/171
Included in
Life Sciences Commons, Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons, Secondary Education Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Sustainability, v. 13, issue 24, 13857.
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).