Scientific Literacy Science and Pseudoscience

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Scientific LiteracyScience and Pseudoscience

• S.M.Tabatabaee
• ??? University of medical science

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Outline

• Introduction
• Statistics
• Solutions
• Definition
• Tests
• Scientific method
• Pseudoscience
• Ethics

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Scientific issues are the subject of many debates

• We live in an age of scientific discovery
• headlines about global warming, cloning, fossils
  in meteorites, or genetically engineered food
• exotic materials
• medical advances
• DNA evidence
• new drugs
• As a consumer, as a business professional, and as
  a citizen

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Some scientists are so focused in one area that
they lack scientific literacy

• a group of twenty-four Ph.D. physicists and
  geologists to explain the difference between DNA
  and RNA
• scientists are just as likely to be ignorant of
  scientific matters outside their own specialty as
  anyone else

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The scope of the problem

• College graduates, as well, fall short on science
  basics.
• fewer than ten percent of graduating seniors
  could explain why its hotter in summer than in
  winter.
• Fully half of the seniors who filled out a
  scientific literacy survey could not correctly
  identify the difference between an atom and a
  molecule.2

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• The average American fails the grade, too.
• fewer than 7 of adults
• 22 of college graduates
• 26 of those with graduate degree

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• According to the national survey commissioned by
  the California Academy of Sciences
• Only 53 of adults know how long it takes for the
  Earth to revolve around the Sun
• Only 59 of adults know that the earliest humans
  and dinosaurs did not live at the same time
• Only 47 of adults can roughly approximate the
  percent of the Earths surface that is covered
  with water
• Only 21 of adults answered all three questions
  correctly

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• Americans score poorly on tests of basic science
  knowledge. This is confirmed by an independent
  investigation of American scientific literacy,
  reported here, which shows that
• Most Americans (53) don't know that the Earth
  goes around the Sun once a year
• Nearly half (48) don't know what percentage of
  the Earth's surface is covered by water
• 42 don't know that no humans lived at the same
  time as dinosaurs
• Nearly 1 in 5 people (19) couldn't answer any
  of these questions correctly.
• Most Americans (67) do not have an
  understanding of the scientific process

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So what to do?

• K-12 Education
• Higher Education
• The General Public

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Project 2061 of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science

• The task was "...setting out for the nation the
  knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that all
  citizens need to live interesting, responsible,
  and productive lives in a culture shaped by
  science and technology

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Science for All Americans

• The result of that project was Science for All
  Americans, published by Project 2061 in 1989." 
• "What should a science-literate adult know and be
  able to do in science, mathematics, and
  technology?

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Benchmarks for Science Literacy

• Benchmarks for Science Literacy is a companion
  report to Science for All Americans
• Benchmarks suggests how students might progress
  toward that goal
• This document is a tool to be used in designing a
  curriculum, not a particular curriculum design
  itself.

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The National Science Education Standards

• the eight categories of content standards are
• Unifying concepts and processes in science
• Science as inquiry
• Physical science
• Life science
• Earth and space science
• Science and technology
• Science in personal and social perspectives
• History and nature of science

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• According to the United States National Center
  for Education Statistics, "scientific literacy is
  the knowledge and understanding of scientific
  concepts and processes required for personal
  decision making, participation in civic and
  cultural affairs, and economic productivity".

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• "the capacity to use scientific knowledge, to
  identify questions and to draw evidence-based
  conclusions in order to understand and help make
  decisions about the natural world and the changes
  made to it through human activity."

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• Scientific literacy means that a person can ask,
  find, or determine answers to questions derived
  from curiosity about everyday experiences. It
  means that a person has the ability to describe,
  explain, and predict natural phenomena.
  Scientific literacy entails being able to read
  with understanding articles about science in the
  popular press and to engage in social
  conversation about the validity of the
  conclusions.
• Scientific literacy implies that a person can
  identify scientific issues underlying national
  and local decisions and express positions that
  are scientifically and technologically informed

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Persons who are scientifically literate

• Know and understand the scientific concepts and
  processes required for participation in society
• Ask, find, or determine answers to questions
  derived from curiosity about their world
• Describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena
• Read with understanding science articles in the
  popular press and engage in social conversation
  about the validity of the conclusions
• Identify scientific issues underlying national
  and local decisions
• Express positions that are scientifically and
  technologically informed
• Evaluate the quality of scientific information on
  the basis of its source and the methods used to
  generate it
• Pose and evaluate arguments based on evidence and
  apply conclusions from such arguments
  appropriately

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Tests
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The Science process

• Planning
• Conducting
• Processing
• Evaluating

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• The scientific method is a way to ask and answer
  scientific questions by making observations and
  doing experiments.
• The steps of the scientific method are to
• Ask a Question
• Do Background Research
• Construct a Hypothesis
• Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
• Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
• Communicate Your Results

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Science Literacy and Pseudoscience

• People in the U.S. know more about basic science
  today than they did two decades ago, good news
  that researchers say is tempered by an unsettling
  growth in the belief in pseudoscience such as
  astrology and visits by extraterrestrial aliens.
• So, science literacy is clearly increasing (from
  10 to 28 according to one measure) but at the
  same time pseudoscientific beliefs are also
  increasing. It strikes me that this may be a
  problem for us as educators in that we might be
  teaching students (and thus the public)
  scientific facts but not teaching them how
  to think scientifically.

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Pseudoscience

• Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice
  which is presented as scientific, but does not
  adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks
  supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot
  be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific
  status. Pseudoscience is often characterized by
  the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated
  or improvable claims, an over-reliance
  on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at
  refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by
  other experts, and a general absence of
  systematic processes to rationally develop
  theories.

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Does Scientific Literacy Make People More Ethical?

• Thinking about science leads individuals to
  endorse more stringent moral norms
• In one of the four supporting experiments,
  undergraduates considered an account of a date
  rape and were asked to judge behavior on a scale
  of 1 to 100. Science types, perhaps not
  surprisingly, proved to have a better grasp of
  reality, including the moral kind.

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The END