Abstract:

Despite essential progress in recent years, the education gap still prevails even in European industrial nations. Children of parents with a university background have a higher probability of finishing high school and university than children with an educationally disadvantaged background. Unfortunately, extra lessons outside school like shadow education or open initiates of civic science education attract also mainly children from well-educated families. Thus, the question arises how we can reach children with a lower educational background.
As a first step to answer this question, we interrogated the participants of an annual school competition by means of an online survey. The independent variable was their parental background, i.e., if at least one of their parents was at university (privileged parental background) or not (non-privileged parental background). We investigated how both groups (privileged versus non-privileged parental background) evaluated the already available incentives of the school competition and asked them for their personal reasons why they participated. Furthermore, we assessed the children’s attitudes towards their influence on societal and scientific issues, as well as their perception of scientific controversies. The aim was to receive insights into the subjective perspective of children with a privileged versus non-privileged parental background.
Overall, there were no significant differences in relation to the parental background for the estimation of the already available incentives of the school competition (e.g., teamwork, free participation, certificate of participation, possibility to work with scientists etc.). However, we found that children with a non-privileged parental background (versus children with a privileged parental background) reported partly more idealistic personal values for their participation at the school competition. They gave higher ratings for benefits for society and benefits for scientific progress, and slightly lower ratings for the value for their later professional careers. Furthermore, children with a non-privileged parental background indicated less interest in economic topics and reported a lower trust in science. Additionally, they reported a more suspicious view of scientific controversies.
These findings might reflect a higher desire of schoolchildren with a non-privileged parental background to make a real change in science and society. So far, many initiatives focus on the benefit for the children’s later careers, especially when addressing children from educationally disadvantaged strata. Our findings suggest that this is not the appropriate incentive. Rather we should highlight the idealistic possibilities, i.e., the benefit for society and scientific progress. The lower trustfulness towards science could also be used as a motivator for a deeper understanding of the scientific contexts.
Our findings provide the basis for new ways of motivating children with lower educational background. We hope our experiences inspire others to conduct further research on the perspective of children and their perception of science and science education.

Keywords:

Civic science education, education gap, parental background, idealism, perceptions of science, science communication, science popularization.