Intellectual Merit: This project addresses foundational issues in science literacy of the general public, developing further a survey instrument and initially using a longitudinal study of undergraduates at the University of Arizona. The overarching question is: What science content knowledge and understanding of process should educated adults have and how can science classes for non-science majors best achieve those goals? The project is refining a coding scheme for answers to the open-ended question "What does it mean to study something scientifically?" and combining it with interviews and scientist responses to the same question, to get a more nuanced measure of student understanding of the scientific process. As part of this effort, the project is revising a currently developed instrument to gain insight into where students get their information about science, conducting interviews to diagnose the interplay between belief systems and scientific knowledge, and developing an instrument to assess the relationship between students' science literacy knowledge, beliefs, and decision-making in their daily lives. All instruments are research-validated, and the results are being disseminated at national meetings to both educators and scientists.
Broader Impacts: Science literacy is a matter of broad concern among scientists, educators, and many policy-makers in the United States. Preliminary analysis of over 11,000 undergraduates shows only small gains in performance in the science knowledge score between incoming freshmen and seniors who graduate having taken three or more General Education science classes, and surprisingly high levels of belief in pseudoscience and supernatural phenomena. Current practice is not very effective in educating graduates who have basic science knowledge and who can discriminate between science and non-science. By diagnosing what students know about the process of science, where they get their science information from, and what role scientific thinking plays in their everyday lives, this project is tackling important aspects of the science literacy problem. It can also suggest pedagogical approaches that can be applied beyond the astronomy courses that are test bed for the proposed research. Success in this arena promises to have the broader impact of helping prepare graduates for participation in a civic society that is increasingly dominated by science and technology
