How Families’ Everyday Engagements Hold Potential for Cultivating Students’ Science Capital and Align with School Science

This study investigates how students’ everyday activities outside school, across various family
contexts, hold potential for shaping distinct forms of science capital and how these forms can align
with school science. The findings are based on 54 interviews with Danish families of students aged
6 to 15 from five schools. While family life encompasses a wide range of science-related
experiences, these activities are often not recognized or framed by families as relevant to formal
education. Instead, parents primarily value these experiences for fostering lifelong skills, personal
development, family bonding, friendships, and well-being. In addition, family engagement in
science-related activities often involves sensory, creative, and aesthetic interactions with natural
objects and phenomena, which contrast significantly with the academic approaches emphasized in
science education. Finally, our results reveal that parents' valued childhood leisure experiences,
interests, values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills influence how science is approached, discussed,
and enacted within families. Consequently, the ways students engage in science-related activities
vary across family contexts, leading to different degrees of alignment between students’ science
experiences outside school and school science. These findings underline that students’ family
experiences play a critical role in shaping the forms of science capital they bring into the classroom,
influencing the extent to which these forms are recognized within school science. The results
highlight the importance of aligning science education with students’ everyday lives to foster more
relevant and inclusive school science. A "Science Capital Teaching Approach" is discussed as a
potential framework for bridging students' experiences with school science