According to many stakeholders there is a strong need to renew science education to bring about a radical change in young people’s interest in science. One way to increase students’ interest in science can be to bring in a humanistic perspective and to focus more on scientific literacy than science literacy. We have designed an evidence-based research project to understand more about what happens when students in lower secondary school are working with socio-scientific issues. Concepts within the affective domain are very complex and therefore many researchers have claimed that we have to construct multidimensional instruments and use multivariate analyses to interpret the results as science learning cannot be explained solely by examination of cognitive factors.
The project is built up in three steps. In the first we have developed a teacher guide with six authentic cases and attitude questionnaires. In next step about 2000 pupils work with the cases and answer the questionnaires and in the last one we will perform a qualitative study in about 6 classes aiming at studying teachers and students’ development in more detail. In this paper we present the development of two questionnaire-based instruments that allow us to simultaneously consider the multivariate characteristics of student, the situation and the outcomes and how they relate to each other. A large number of items were collected from extant questionnaires and if necessary, adapted to Swedish conditions. In addition, new items were constructed, based on theory within the relevant fields of research. The aspects we want to assess besides different types of knowledge outcomes are for example attitudes, motivation, epistemological beliefs, self-efficacy and the impact of different working forms.