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This article presents Swedish results from ‘the Relevance of Science Education’ (ROSE) study, which is a large world wide comparative research project based at the University of Oslo. The Swedish sample consisted of 751 students, most of whom were 15 years old, from 29 schools and data were collected inspring 2003. Student opinions about science lessons are presented in relation to enrolment intentions for upper secondary school together with what they want to learn about in science and technology.The findings indicate that secondary science instruction seems to address only a minority of the students, those that have chosen science or technology in their further education. At the same time, all students have interest in science and technology and many seem most interested in some important issues in societal development. The results are discussed from the perspective of learners and contribute to the debate about establishing a scientific literacy approach in compulsory education.

Various features of scientific discourse have been characterized in the science education literature and challenges students face in appropriating these features have been explored. Using the framework of conceptual metaphor, this paper sought to identify explicit and implicit metaphors in pedagogical texts dealing with the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, an abstract and challenging domain for learners. Three university level textbooks were analyzed from a conceptual metaphor perspective and a range of explicit and implicit metaphors identified. Explicit metaphors identified include Entropy As Disorder, Thermodynamics Processes As Movements Along A Path, and Energetic Exchange As Financial Transactions among others. Implicit metaphors include application and elaboration of the generic Location Event Structure metaphor, application of the Object Event Structure metaphor, and others. The similarities and differences between explicit and implicit metaphors found in the textbooks are also described. Two key pedagogical implications are discussed: that the selection of explicit instructional metaphors can be guided by consistency with implicit metaphors; and that the range of implicit metaphors found in pedagogical texts imply that a multiple instructional metaphor strategy is warranted. The depth of the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor and its implications for future research are also discussed.Arrow of Time 3

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A challenge in the teaching of entropy is that the word has several different senses, which may provide an obstacle for communication. This study identifies five distinct senses of the word 'entropy', using the Principled Polysemy approach from the field of linguistics. A semantic network is developed of how the senses are related, using text excerpts from dictionaries, text books and text corpora. Educational challenges such as the existence of several formal senses of entropy and the intermediary position of entropy as disorder along the formal/non-formal scale are presented using a two-Dimensional Semiotic/semantic Analysing Schema (2-D SAS).