We explored the potential for addressing nature of science through a historic narrative about disagreement between researchers concerning a socio-scientific issue, incidence of juvenile thyroid cancer following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The narrative was developed from authentic sources and tested in two cycles. Eight groups of three…

Objective: We investigated how individuals deal with the limits of their own knowledge and productively cope with their dependence on experts as they engage with the socio-scientific topic of nuclear energy. We scrutinized the effects of content features of an interview text and of individuals' communicative engagement with the information read.…

Multi-authoring has been gaining popularity since the foundation of academic publishers. Today we observe a global trend in favor of multi-authoring. On the other hand, in certain domains, such as CERN collaborations in physics, multi-authoring has a different connotation than other domains. The number of co-authors may be above 5000, an all-time…

Background: Many students carry negative beliefs about nuclear radiation and have concerns regarding the safety of nuclear power. However, most of these students have not had any personal or educational experiences with nuclear radiation or reactors on which to form these opinions. Purpose: To examine the influence that a visit to a nuclear…

We report on our experience with the implementation of project-based teamwork on nuclear energy with 14 ninth-grade students from a lower secondary model school and its assessment using two written questionnaires, which were answered by the students after the completion of the project. The first questionnaire elicited students' opinions about the…

This mixed methods study investigated the extent to which author expertise and content relevance were salient to secondary Norwegian students (N = 153) when they selected documents that pertained to more familiar and less familiar topics. Quantitative results indicated that author expertise was more salient for the less familiar topic (nuclear…

Employment in nuclear- and nuclear energy-related activities in 1981 was examined and compared to that in previous years. Survey instruments were returned by 784 establishments. Total 1981 nuclear-related employment was estimated to be 249,500--a growth of 22,600 (10%) workers over the 1977 total. Government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO)…

Employment and professional activities of recent science and engineering graduates who described their work as energy-related were examined. The survey included graduates who received bachelor's or master's degrees between 1972 and 1979 and was conducted in 1976, 1978, 1979, and 1980. Data indicated that the number of graduates who reported…