Study title

The purpose of "Students' Understanding and Use of Scientific Knowledge, 1997" was to increase insight in students' use of scientific knowledge and information when facing controversies of a scientific dimension, as well as looking at students' evaluation of the reliability of different types of scientific information. The background for the project was the increase in emphasizing general education in schools' curriculums for science. There was also little knowledge on how students evaluated and made use of scientific information in their daily life. To gain more insight in the above-mentioned problems, 22 in-depth interviews were carried out with students attending upper secondary school, during the period of January to June 1997. The main findings in the project were related to different strategies for evaluation of trustworthiness of information, related to a special context in the form of the controversy related to the possible health risks of growing up close to high-tension wires. Another main finding was related to models for how different information and different values affected different students' stands in the same controversial case.