Twenty-Year Survey of Scientific Literacy and Attitudes Toward Science: Students’ Acceptance of Astrology and Pseudoscience

Details Twenty-Year Survey of Scientific Literacy and Attitudes Toward Science: Students’ Acceptance of Astrology and Pseudoscience Twenty-Year Survey of Scientific Literacy and Attitudes Toward Science: Students’ Acceptance of Astrology and Pseudoscience

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21544709s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #447.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.416

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Our survey used to collect data during a twenty-year long investigation into the science literacy of undergraduates (see Impey et al., this meeting), contains several questions addressing how students conceptualize astrology, and other pseudoscientific ideas. This poster presents findings from the quantitative analysis of some of these question responses from almost 10,000 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory astronomy courses from 1989 to 2009. The results from our data reveal that a large majority of students (78%) and half of science majors (52%) consider astrology either "very” or "sort of” scientific. Students performed comparatively better on all other pseudoscientific questions, demonstrating that belief in astrology is pervasive and deeply entrenched. We compare our results to those obtained by the NSF Science Indicators series, and suggest possible reasons for the high susceptibility to belief in astrology. These findings call into question whether our education system is adequately preparing students to be scientifically literate adults. You can help! Stop by our poster and fill out a new survey that will give us important parallel information to help us continue to analyze our valuable data set. We acknowledge the NSF for funding under Award No. 0715517, a CCLI Phase III Grant for the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS) Program.

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