Characterizing children's spontaneous interests in science and technology

This article reports the results of an analysis of 1676 science and technology questions submitted by Israeli children to a series of television programmes. It categorizes the children's questions with reference to five different coding schemes: field of interest, motivation for asking the question, type of information requested, country-specific aspects, and source of information. The results point to the popularity of biology, technology, and astrophysics over other sciences, indicate a shift in interests and motivation with age, and reflect a variety of gender-related differences within the sample. The implications of the findings for some current trends in curriculum development and for informal science education are discussed with reference to the wider context of the pupils' voice in education.