Agreement about the purposes for science education by educators, politicians, and business leader

The nation needed a clear, well developed set of current purposes for science education which were widely agreed-upon by people in science education. The purposes developed in the 1970s were not meeting the national needs of science education in the 1990s. The study sought to identify from literature the current purposes for science education, and to determine if there was significant agreement about the purposes within and between interested science educators, politicians, and business leaders.;To answer the research questions, six groups were asked to complete a survey giving their degree of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale and to rank each purpose as to its importance for contemporary science education. A total of 315 surveys were sent to participants in the study. A total of 216 respondents completed the survey for a return rate of 68.8 percent. The survey sought agreement about the following seven purposes for science education, science skills, scientific habits of the mind, science literacy, science knowledge, science careers, science and society interactions, and the values, ethics, and appreciation of science.;The responses for all six groups were tabulated for the group percent agreement. Rankings of importance were analyzed by the Friedman statistic to determine the degree of significant agreement within and between each of the research groups about the purposes. The level of significance was set at p $<$.01.;There was significant agreement within each of the six research groups as to importance for all seven identified purposes far contemporary science education. There was also significant agreement between each of the six research groups as to importance for all seven identified purposes for contemporary science education.;Political leaders differed from other groups on three ranking placements. The elementary and secondary teachers were very similar in their rankings for each of the purposes. The state science supervisors and the Eisenhower Grant recipients were similar in their ranking placements on six of the purposes. The business leaders were not in agreement with the other groups on their placement of science careers, placing science careers as a higher importance than any other group.