Vetenskap eller Pseudovetenskap? En studie om elevers uppfattningar om naturvetenskap, pseudovetenskap och tillförlitlighet

Sammanfattning: The purpose with this licentiate thesis is to investigate upper secondary students’ ideas about science and pseudoscience in the field of human biology and health. The purpose is also to investigate young peoples’ opinions about what can be counted as trustworthy information. There are two empirical parts. The first part is a survey that aims to explore what pseudoscientific ideas students in upper secondary school hold and their ideas related to their scientific knowledge concerning the human body and health. The study also seeks to investigate if there is any gender or educational differences related to these issues. The results demonstrate a lack of correlation between knowledge in science and opinions about pseudoscience. There was a correlation between studied courses in science and low belief to pseudoscience only when the students had studied three or more science courses. There were no differences in belief between the genders. In the second study the aim was to investigate and analyse what kind of recourses that are released when students discuss issues that are related to scientific, as well as non-scientific proposals of explanations. Four different categories/of epistemological resources were identified in the data; relativistic, normative, authoritative and scientific, where only the last two contain some connection to science or the scientific culture. The students were to some degree trained to raise questions, but very few of the students used scientific arguments in order to explain their point of view in the discussions.