A framework for investigating immigrant students’ attitudes towards science, exemplified with data from Turkish families

Abstract

In this article, we draw on sociocultural, cognitive and affective perspectives to investigate the factors lying behind immigrant school students’ attitudes and aspirations towards science. We combine Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social capital to produce a new theoretical framework for understanding how these factors operate. One part of our framework focuses on students’ cognitive and affective resources, such as enjoyment, self-efficacy, engagement and intrinsic motivation. Another relates to students’ sociocultural resources, such as gender, class, home language, parental expectations and perceived teacher encouragement, which are filtered through notions of field and students’ immigrant status. We then exemplify this framework by exploring the attitudes towards science of two Turkish immigrant secondary school students in England, as revealed by questionnaires that they completed and interviews with them and their parent(s). Our tentative conclusion is that our theoretical framework, in its combination of a Bourdieusian perspective and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, may help make sense of why some immigrant school students continue with science and others do not.