(237)GENDER DIFFERENCES ON YOUNG STUDENTS’ ATTITUDESTOWARD NATURE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSUES

摘要

This paper aims to diagnose the epistemological conceptions of a wide sample of youngstudents by means of the Questionnaire of Opinions on Science, Technology and Societyapplying a new powerful quantitative methodology that allows inferential statistics(significance tests of differences). The paper analyses a representative sample ofstudents, and compares girls and boys from science and art specialities, a strangeagenda in science education literature as it is only focused in science students. Theoverall results show neutral, slightly positive global attitudes, and the detailed analysisalong issues allows identifying the students’ most positive and most negative beliefs. Thecomparison among girls and boys show that girls and boys students, contradicting theprevious expectations, do not differentiate at all, no matter their science or artbackground. Besides, girls’ show a trend to get slightly better indexes than men. Theimplications of these results for the teaching of nature of the science and technologycontents and for the student learning are discussed.