Nowadays it is almost consensual that scientific literacy is a desired outcome of school science education at an international level. Not only science educators, but also economists and policy maker’s worldwide claim that scientific literacy is in the root of the economic development of a country and also that improving pupils’ scientific literacy is the right way to foster the participation of informed citizens in society.

Consequently, to promote and assess pupils’ scientific literacy had become a main goal in many countries, but being also a main concern since as the European Commission (2007) point out, “in recent years, many studies have highlighted an alarming decline in young people’s interest for key science studies and mathematics” (p.2). Also the OECD (2007, 2004 and 2000) with the PISA study has been revealing how fragile is the scientific literacy of the 15 years old pupils of many countries, such as the case of Portugal.

Research has been suggesting several practices that have proved to contribute to promote pupils’ scientific literacy, nevertheless, in the majority of the European countries, these methods are simply not being implemented (European Commission, 2007). As a matter of fact, “in current practice, content and a oversimplified view of scientific processes are often the primary or even the sole foci of instruction; however, the evidence indicates that this leads to a very impoverished understanding of science and masks the complex process involved in developing scientific evidence and explanations” (National Research Council, 2007, p. 335).   

Therefore, being aware that is not enough to suggest a change in teacher practices even if simultaneously we strength that curricula also states the methodologies that teachers should implement in order to promote pupils’ scientific literacy, we thought that a possible way to overcome the existing gap between research and practice, may be to show explicitly to science teachers why are their pupils performing so weak in scientific literacy and then, to suggest better and more effective ways of working in science classrooms according to the results found. Instead of just stating goals in science programmes and to publish books or journal articles with research results suggesting new or different teacher approaches, may be more efficient to depart from the results of studies intending to diagnose science education problems to promote teachers awareness of the factors that can contribute to unsuccessful practices, showing ways to foster pupils’ scientific literacy in pre-service and long-life teacher training programs. Consequently, we decided to develop an exploratory research study aiming to enlighten some reasons why pupils perform weak in scientific literacy and to suggest teacher practices that may contribute to overcome the problems founded leading, therefore to foster pupils’ scientific literacy. This first step followed by a supervised collaborative work in schools that help teachers in the changing process may be a way to progressively improve science teacher practices aiming scientific literacy.

Alceste (version 4.9 pour Windows): Un logiciel d’analyse de donnés textuelles [computer software]. (2007). Toulouse, France: Image. European Commission (2007). Science education now: a renewed pedagogy for the future of Europe. http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/report-rocard-on-science-education_en.pdf National Research Council. (2007). Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in grades K-8. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. OECD (2000). Measuring student knowledge and skills: the PISA 2000 assessment of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. Paris: OCDE Publications. OECD (2004). Learning for tomorrow’s world: first results from PISA 2003. Paris: OCDE Publications. OECD (2006). Assessing scientific, reading and mathematical literacy: a framework for PISA 2006. Paris: OCDE Publications. OECD (2007). PISA 2006: Science competencies for tomorrow’s World – executive summary. Paris: OCDE Publications.