Secondary school students' reasoning about science and personhood

Journal article

Billingsley, B. and Nassaji, M. 2021. Secondary school students' reasoning about science and personhood. Science & Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00199-x
AuthorsBillingsley, B. and Nassaji, M.
AbstractScientific advances, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of personhood. This paper reports the first large-scale study on students' beliefs about the interactions between science and widely held beliefs about personhood. The paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey (  = 530) administered to English secondary school students (age 15-16) in which their beliefs and concepts regarding personhood and the position of science were investigated. The survey was motivated in part by an interview study and a previous, smaller survey which revealed that many students struggle to reconcile their beliefs with what they suppose science to say and also that some have reluctantly dismissed the soul as a 'nice story' which is incompatible with scientific facts. The results from this larger-scale survey indicate that a majority of the students believe in some form of soul. Even so, and regardless of whether or not they identified themselves as religious, most students expressed a belief that human persons cannot be fully explained scientifically, a position that some students perceived as a partial rejection of what it means to hold a scientific worldview. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s) 2021.]
KeywordsSecondary school students; Teenagers; Reasoning; Science education; Personhood; Self
Year2021
JournalScience & Education
ISSN0926-7220
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00199-x
Official URLhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-021-00199-x
Publication dates
Online13 Apr 2021
Publication process dates
Accepted28 Jan 2021
Deposited05 May 2021
Publisher's version
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File Access Level
Open
Page range1-25
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