Nowadays, knowledge of science and knowledge about science are more important than ever. Science is relevant to everyone’s life, and an understanding of science is an essential tool for people in achieving their goals (AAAS, 1989). Lee (1999) defined the conceptual change research in science education as “consistently define scientific knowledge in terms of concepts, principles, theories, and models that are important for all students to know, understand, and use in the fields or disciplines of science”. The needs of general scientific and technological literacy are often based on the argument that about the effective workforce participation in the twenty-first century requires a certain amount of scientific knowledge (Lee & Fradd, 1996). The reform agendas focused on a general scientific literacy as an important goal to be achieved whereas some scientists are blatantly opposed to the possibility of a general scientific literacy, pointing out that science is an elitist calling; raw intelligence and special skills (Levitt, 1999). Indeed, empirical studies show that the relationship between formal scientific knowledge and attitudes toward science is significant and positive (Sturgis & Allum, 2004; Bybee, 2008). Additionally, many studies indicate that scientific interestest is strongly related to family background characteristics, particularly parental education, income, and young adults’ socioeconomic outcomes, and they also found that parental education and family income are positively correlated with the probability that young adult pursue post-secondary education (Sandefur et al, 2005), whereas there is no significant different between gender and science performance, but there are significant differences between gender and attitudes in science. In some studies pointed that the father’s socioeconomic characteristics and father’s occupation were impact predictors among boys. (Mark, 2008). This paper considers the relative influence of family background, school characteristic and cultural context in the attitudes and knowledge about science in Portugal and Thailand.

The OECD’s 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been used in this study. PISA 2006 is a well known database to investigate student achievement of more than 400,000 15-year-old students from 57 countries. This database focus on students’ competencies in science but the assessment also included reading and mathematics and collected data on student, family and institutional factors that could help to explain differences in performance. We will present a cross-cultural study using data from Portugal (N = 5,109) and Thailand (N = 6,192); our goal is to perform a secondary analysis to compare the predictors of attitudes and knowledge in science.

It is expectable that the results will reveal differences in the sets of predictors that explain the differences of attitudes and knowledge of 15 year old students about science. Portugal and Thailand have specific cultural characteristics which are educationally relevant and will certainly account for a strong variation of the results. For instance, our preliminary analyses show that how many books at home, educational level of mother have a different predictive power in the two countries. Results will be discussed in terms of their implications for a comprehensive understanding of cross – cultural differences in educational research.