Student Technology Services
it is a happy coincidence that orientation of science instruction to issues of society meets the interests of students, most notably of both girls and boys. in the study on interests in physics presented above, only items that fall into a STS orientation displayed a growing interest from grades 5 to 10 and also showed about the same interests for boys and girls in grads 10. studies on attitudes towards energy supply issues resulted in similar conclusions. kuhn (1979) found a slightly higher awareness of the need of energy conservation (in the sense of saving energy ) among girls whereas boys showed a little more interest in developing new energy resources. lawrenz and Dantchik (1985) who used the same "energy opinionnaire" as Kuhn (1979) found a growing interest in saving energy issues when students become older. they also found gender differences of the following kind. older girls were more in favor of conservation than boys, especially in the context of providing for others. Also the high school girls were overwhelmingly more in favor of governmental control than boys' (lawrenz and Dantchik, 1985,p.188).