Sverre Pettersen was a laboratory researcher in the field of coronary heart diseases before he in 1992 became an associate professor at Akershus University College, Lillestrøm, where he teaches biological sciences for nursing students, as well as being supervisor for students attending the college's master programme. He has also taught biology, chemistry and mathematics in Norwegian upper secondary school for 12 years. From the year of 2000 he has followed the doctoral programme in science education at the Institute of teacher training and school development, University of Oslo. In his present research project, he mainly explores the "status" of science and scientific knowledge among students and teachers of Norwegian health sciences.
AbstractBy definition, complementary alternative medicine (CAM) treatments are not scientifically proven. Scientific deficient health claiming news seems to flourish in the media. The aims of this questionnaire study was to explore: (1) attitudes towards CAM among 3 rd year students of the health sciences in Norway, who either have immersed themselves in the 2 nd and 3 rd year upper secondary biology courses, or taken the 1 st year compulsory natural science course, exclusively, and (2) these students' skills in requesting for scientific information in highly deficient health news briefs. There were no significant differences in the frequencies of positive attitude towards the use of CAM treatments between the two health sciences student categories, and most students in both categories "failed" in the test set out to measure their skills in requesting for scientific information in four highly scientific deficient health news briefs. The results suggest that teaching of the Norwegian upper secondary biology courses does probably not contribute extensively to pupils' development of scepticism towards CAM, and skills in evaluating health claims, scientifically. [62] 2/05 engage in or think about science (Kuhn, 2001). Intrinsic to epistemic understanding is knowledge of the criteria by which scientific knowledge is evaluated. Such criteria include plausible causal mechanisms, parsimony, consistency with observed data, and consistency with current theories (Lederman, 1992).