Half-life and Lifeworld: The Omission of School Knowledge in Writing about Radioactive Waste

We report on a pilot study investigating student writing about radioactive waste before and after instruction on half-life. We found that none of the (N = 21) 12th-grade students mentioned half-life on the post-test writing task, despite the post-test being separated from the intervention by only a short amount of time. This is consistent with previous research conducted by Eijkelhof et al. which showed that, even after formal learning, students are unlikely to be influenced in terms of their views about topics in the lifeworld (such as where to store waste from nuclear power plants). Our study, though small, is pioneering in that we analyze both student writings and responses to survey questions in our assertion that the issue is neither student writing ability nor conceptual understanding. We hypothesize, rather, that students (at least on a sub-conscious level) do not think the topic of half-life is relevant to the writing task. This suggests that instruction aiming to improve student writing about science issues in the lifeworld should provide scaffolding to emphasize the usefulness of school knowledge in that writing.