There are persistent gender inequalities in science participation, further stratified by social class and ethnicity. This study takes a sociological approach to examine how interacting social axes shape girls’ engagement with science within lessons, class visits and family visits to science museums. The data were collected through interviews, focus groups and observations with the girls (n=15), their parents (n=10) and their science teachers (n=4) and analysed by drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and Butler’s theory of gender performativity. The main contribution of this study is an in-depth understanding of the vital role that social contexts play in shaping girls’ engagement with science. This study found that ethnicity complicated the influence of working class backgrounds, in that high parental aspirations and support for science positively shaped their identification with the subject and their aspirations. Yet, there was a gendered and ethnic aspect of science capital, which challenged how they recognised and deployed their limited resources. Engagement with science was produced when their resources and dispositions aligned with expectations of a particular social context. A change in a physical setting was not enough to open up opportunities for engagement, without also a shift in norms, values and recognition. Performances of heterofemininity were mostly in tension with engagement with science in the context of the science class. The girls who behaved well and worked quietly, performing restrained heterofemininity, risked invisibility. The celebrated ways of engaging with science required confident displays of knowledge, enacted through ‘muscular intellect’. The family context provided different opportunities for the girls’ engagement with science to the science class, but these were constrained by the challenges they encountered during their science museum visits.

Concerns about the low representation of women in science and technology have been voiced for many years by scientists and non-scientists alike and have been the subject of much debate and research in education by governments and individuals. Current concerns about the underachievement of boys have led to the specific issue in secondary education of girls and physics sliding down the political agenda but the continuing general decline in the numbers of pupils opting for science is a worrying trend which needs to be addressed. Women's studies have involved looking for alternative approaches to the male dominated and orientated scientific establishment and feminist writers have discussed this area of discrimination and inequality from different standpoints. In this research, I used a feminist approach which emphasises: improving women's lives; criticising dominant systems of knowledge; being praxis-orientated and creative in order to change the way physics is taught in school. I carried out the research through the use of semi-structured interviews with pupils and teachers to shed light on the research questions which asked why boys felt encouraged to study physics whilst girls opted for other subjects;how teachers perceived science and how a feminist perspective could be related to a new science curriculum. The outcomes from interviews with pupils and teachers suggested ways in which physics could be more gender inclusive, by adopting interdisciplinary approaches, greater cross-curricular work and moving away from the emphasis on scientific facts towards greater debate and discussion. Further interviews with focus groups and case studies teachers pointed to possible changes and successful alternatives for physics classes through the adoption of different approaches: changing not only what was taught but how it was taught. I then worked with curriculum development colleagues to create a new science curriculum and this was successfully implemented in classes,showing that a change in approach to teaching about physics at school level is essential and could lead to greater pupil engagement in physics classes.

The oeuvre which I present spans a period of time during which the use of ICT in science education has been transformed from a technical teaching aid into a major genre of activity on a national and international scale. My contribution to this change has been as a researcher, teacher trainer, software author and electronics designer. Such a combination of roles has made my approach multidisciplinary, creating a unique partnership between research, pedagogy and technical development. The fruits of my work have influenced practice directly in science departments in secondary schools through the publication of articles, chapters and a book, and especially through the dissemination of original curriculum materials, hardware tools and the Insight suite of software. Embedded in these tools are my understandings of the new context for learning science, rooted in constructivism and derived from professional experience, classroom research studies and research literature. My aim throughout has been to promote ideas which will help the science education community gain a vision of the full potential of ICT. It will be shown that my activities in each of three strands, research, literature study and curriculum development, have been interconnected at many stages such that advances in one strand have prompted progress in another in a stepwise fashion. Thus, my curriculum developments have provided the tools for study, my evaluative field research has provided insights for refining the tools and of new opportunities for their use, research literature has deepened my understanding of the issues and has identified criteria for the design of the curriculum tools and for research methodology. In total, this process itself has exemplified a constructivist development and is reflected in the portfolio items which begin with practitioner articles and graduate to papers linking research findings to theoretical arguments.

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Practical work is seen as having an important role in school science. In particular many have claimed that it has an essential role in determining students' attitudes to school science and science beyond the classroom. However, whilst there has been much research into students'attitudes to science there has been little research into their attitudes to practical work in particular. This study considers students' attitudes in terms of the cognitive, affective and behavioural analytical framework developed by Rosenberg (1960). The study is based on data collected from three English secondary schools within Key Stages 3 and 4. It involved questionnaires in biology, chemistry and physics as well as school visits that involved lesson observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with students. Field notes and audio-recordings were made throughout these visits for subsequent analysis. The findings suggest that secondary students' attitudes to practical work are, generally speaking, positive. However, what also emerged was the extent to which such attitudes to practical work differed, not only across the three sciences, but also showed a statistically significant decline as students progressed through their secondary school education. The reason for this being that the relative importance of the cognitive, affective and behavioural domains changed as students moved away from a focus on the enjoyment of science towards one that was examination orientated. The implications of this study suggests that teachers need to be far more aware that students' attitudes to practical work need to be consider according to the science they are studying and their age, rather than seeing their attitudes to practical work being unchanging and uniform across the three sciences.

This thesis is a video-aided ethnomethodological study of computer-aided research in postgraduate-level scientific projects in two disciplines (astrophysics and electrical engineering), drawing on fields including science and technology studies, the sociology of science education and ethnomethodological studies of work. The aim of this study is to explore how computerised research technologies are developed, modified and worked with in scientific disciplines, and the objective has been to investigate some of the ways in which these technologies can be used to address specific research problems, and the work that goes into successfully doing research with them.A broad overview of the findings of this work is that for sociological accounts of scientific research and education, failing to understand the scientific content of these activities is the same as misunderstanding the activity entirely. What is found through investigating thesesettings with this idea in mind is that science cannot be understand as entirely cultural and conventional as it tends to be portrayed in sociological accounts. Rather, scientists draw on lots of different resources to do with science, programming and the computational tools that allow them to proceed with their work systematically and positively (i.e. in ways that clearly contribute towards the achieving of pre-defined goals). These resources may well include cultures and conventions, but these are better understood as situated alongside an array of other features such as conceptual knowledge of science and mathematics, practical understandings of the settings at hand, and so on. Therefore, this thesis aims to present various features of scientific work exemplifying how these resources are used and how their usage fits into wider project and/or scientific goals and objectives.

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The Victorian nursery was filled with the potential for scientific lessons. From the bookshelves, children could listen to fairy-tales of wondrous forces and minuscule creatures; from the toy-chest, they could play with hoops and tops that demonstrated the laws of motion; at the table, they could taste and smell the chemical constituents of a cup of tea; in the garden, they could pick up a pebble and envision long-vanished lands. Through practical interactions with the objects of domestic life, imaginative stories of the wonders of nature were revealed, scientific knowledge was communicated, mental modes of rational reasoning were enhanced, and bodily skills were entrained. This dissertation analyses how such lessons on common things provided sensory introductions to the sciences in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The 'object lesson', I argue, was a crucial genre of elementary educational practice and literary representation in this period. It emphasised that children acquired knowledge directly through sensory impressions, and advocated conversation and play as effective means of developing structured skills of attention, logical reasoning, and expanded vocabularies; hence, practical scientific subjects were particularly appropriate for this style of teaching. I begin with visual education, analysing how children were trained to open their eyes in the 'art of seeing' the geological past; wondrous tales of forces and fairies that fired childish imaginations to rethink the commonplace objects of the world form the focus of chapter two; hands-on domestic activities appear in the third chapter, which explores household chemistry via tasting tea and smelling soap; the fourth chapter considers speech and the voices of nature through first-person narratives from trees and salt and fossils; and finally, in chapter five we will learn about the astronomical meanings artefacts could hold when held and manipulated, as boys and girls played among the stars. Mirroring this diverse array of topics, the dissertation deals with a rich collection of historic material, which spans the spectrum of Victorian childhood experience and complicates abrupt distinctions between instructional and amusing texts and pastimes: my sources include didactic tracts and manuals, gift-books and periodicals, pocket globes and chemistry sets, caricatures and terrible puns, novels and fairy-tales, foodstuffs and beverages, songs and board games. These often fanciful, occasionally funny, usually fact-ridden expositions articulated the process of how to gain knowledge from singular, concrete, common things. Thus, they can teach us how to interrogate Victorian artefacts ourselves, with a similar sensitivity to their histories, materiality, and hidden wonders, glimpsed under their surfaces. Moreover, through their overt emphasis on the science of common things these lessons were simultaneously revelations of and arguments for the interpenetration of scientific and everyday life: the objects of the home were scientific, and men of science were domestic experts. This identification between the specialist and the quotidian supports an argument for 'familiar science' as a helpful analytic category when studying this period. Emphasising both the family context and the exploitation of already-known ideas and already-owned artefacts, as well as a particular mode of writing - that of the 'familiar introduction' - I reflect on how such a term can solve some of the acknowledged problems associated with labels such as 'popular' or 'commercial' science at this time.