engleski

Encouraging Scientific Literacy for the Future: Parents' Attitudes

This paper presents research on parents’ attitudes about the role and importance of scientific literacy in their children’s lives, conducted in kindergartens in western Croatia between June and September 2013. The research has come from scientific literacy project “Could it be different?! How children research it” which involved pre-school children in different activities aiming at encouraging their curiosity, creativity, critical thinking and self-regulated learning through research. The objectives of the research were to determine whether parents accept the elements of theoretical background of the project (constructivism) and what their attitudes on science in general were. We used Inglehart’s theory of materialistic and post-materialistic values for the second objective and developed an instrument adapted for our specific topic. The sample included both parents whose children participated in the project as well as parents whose children did not participated, the total number of which was N=105. The research results confirmed the existence of materialistic and post- materialistic type but also revealed a third type which we named entepreneurial type. The difference between parents with participating and non- participating children appeared in post- materialistic values – parents whose children participated accepted them more than those parents whose children did not participate in the project. Parents whose children participated in the project also accepted all the elements of theoretical background of the project. This evaluation showed that small and well-implemented projects of this type can still make a difference in families and institutuions but further research is necessary to confirm this, due to a small sample.

scientific literacy; parents’ attitudes; materialistic values; post-materialistic values; project evaluation

Znanstveni projekt "Kultura odgojno-obrazovne ustanove kao čimbenik sukonstrukcije znanja", Sveučilište u Rijeci, broj potpore: 13.10.2.2.01, voditeljica: izv. prof. dr. sc. Lidija Vujičić