A Long-Term Study of Science Literacy and Attitudes Towards Science: Comparing Survey Responses of Undergraduates to Scientists

Details A Long-Term Study of Science Literacy and Attitudes Towards Science: Comparing Survey Responses of Undergraduates to Scientists A Long-Term Study of Science Literacy and Attitudes Towards Science: Comparing Survey Responses of Undergraduates to Scientists

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21925106b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #251.06

Computer Science

Learning

Scientific paper

Drawing from a database of over 10,000 undergraduate student responses to a science literacy survey, derived from policy driven projects (e.g. NSF Science Indicators), we have explored the change in students’ understandings and beliefs about science and technology from 1989 to 2011. Our analysis has revealed little change in students’ science literacy scores over twenty-two years. In addition, student demographic variables, including major and number of science courses completed, predicts less than 10% of the variance in students’ overall science literacy scores. Recently, we have analyzed students’ responses to four open-ended questions and compared their ideas to those of scientists asked the same questions. A word count analysis showed that when describing what it means to study something scientifically, students used the words "hypothesis", "study", "method", "test", and "experiment” the most. Surprisingly, scientists used the same words the most when answering the same question on a similar survey. In contrast, other words that scientists considered to be important in describing how to study something scientifically such as "creativity” and "imagination” were mentioned by only eleven students across the twenty-two years. Overall, there is evidence that non-science major students are able to describe science using many of the words we consider to be important in science although not in the same way as scientists. We describe implications of assessing student science literacy and learning what our students know about specific topics in science. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0715517, a CCLI Phase III Grant for the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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