Morten Rask Petersen

Interest and Emotions in Science Education

Interest is an important affective variable that has been found to be associated with focused attention, higher cognitive functioning, and learning, which makes it important for learning science. In research on interest and learning, this interplay is almost always seen in a unidirectional way where interest is a facilitator of learning. The aim of this chapter is to challenge this unidirectional view on the role of interest – with special emphasis on feelings – in learning science. We do this by reversing the direction and investigating if learning science can be a facilitator for developing interest. We start with a theoretical outline of interest and feelings connected to this. This will be put into the context of students’ work in upper secondary biology education for an empirical approach to this interplay. The empirical work will provide arguments for the theoretical outline but also qualify the final discussion on the role of interest and the attached emotions, feelings, and moods in science education in general at a theoretical and practical level and how these correspond with leaning science.

The living dead: Transformative experiences in modelling natural selection

Abstract This study considers how students change their coherent conceptual understanding of natural selection through a hands-on simulation. The results show that most students change their understanding. In addition, some students also underwent a transformative experience and used their new knowledge in a leisure time activity. These transformative experiences appear in different categories where students find value both towards biological content, societal value and individual identity. Finally there is a discussion on how to transfer characteristics from the setting of this study to other educational settings in biology and science in general.