The growing importance of scientific issues in our daily lives - on global, national, and local levels - has over the past decades motivated the emergence of a new goal category in science education: Scientific literacy. It can be seen as a parallel to ordinary literacy (reading and writing skills) and to numeracy (mathematical/calculating skills for everyday life), and it reflects an insight into science and its meta aspects and a willingness to engage in the socio-scientific debate on an informed basis. But the concept is far from well defined and no common understanding has been internationally accepted. On top of this you often experience a tension between traditional goals in science education and more citizenship oriented goals. The tensions seems to be more pronounced in countries with relatively tight standards in science education (Waddington et al. 2007) These problems raise the question addressed in this presentation: Which tensions are embedded in the concept of scientific literacy in educational contexts and how are these tensions dealt with in different cultures? The presentation will start with a short view on the differences between literacy and other ways of describing the educational aims (qualifications, competencies, 'bildung') and their implications for education - and for teaching and learning. In some aspects you can argue that literacy and competence are connected to the Anglo-American curriculum tradition while the 'bildung' goals are close to the Central European 'didactics' tradition (Westbury 2000). In a decline perspective you might look at this development as an educational step backward, as an adaptation of our school system to the liberal, market driven logic, which originally introduced the competencies into the school. But in a learning orientated perspective you may consider the literacy-competence direction as a way to a more progressive pedagogic. The presentation will take this more proactive stand.

Scientific literacy in a curriculum perspective will be discussed on the basis of Roberts' (2007) two opposite approaches to scientific literacy: 'looking inward to science itself' and 'looking inward from situations to science'. The PISA 2006 definition of scientific literacy (OECD 2006) will then be placed within Roberts' dichotomy and used as an international benchmarking for different national interpretations of scientific literacy. The national literacy documents will be analyzed by 1) comparative text analysis and 2) the text mapping program PAJEC

The results from the research project 'Validation of PISA 2006 science in a Danish context' (Dolin et al. 2006) will be presented. It will be shown how the Danish science curriculum for 15 years old is more oriented towards bildung and has another understanding of competencies than the PISA understanding. The consequences for the educational development in Denmark will be discussed. As a second example results from the EU project Mind The Gap will be displayed. The Danish work package deals with inquiry based science teaching as a way to scientific literacy in different European countries. Conceptions of scientific literacy from a selection of countries will be analysed and interpreted in the light of the different educational cultures.