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In its root meaning, literacy has to do with the written word. What, then, are we to make of nouveau literacies -- quantitative literacy, functional literacy, art literacy, computer literacy -- that appear, on the face of it, to be less bound by words? This essay focuses on science literacy, another of the new breed. That broad public education in science is indispensable in our national life is accepted as wisdom and articulated by throngs of leading citizens, led by President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich, who make common cause on the subject. But how does one define science literacy and measure it? And what progress is being made in public education to advance its achievement among American children?
Shortcomings in science education in U.S. schools have been the subject of thought and attention for almost two generations. After World War II and the normalization period that followed, the public first sensed something radically wrong about the way science was being taught when the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space with the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Science education in the public schools shared in the blame. In short order, the scientific community mobilized, and public funds poured into a huge effort to bring science and mathematics teaching up to speed and to reform public school curricula throughout the country. In the late 1970s, public attention returned to the subject when awareness spread once again that the earlier fixes had barely begun to address the enormous task. In 1985, a major study of the immediate needs and those extending well into the 21st century was launched. When the report was published in 1989, it underscored the reality that improvement in science literacy will take decades of work in U.S. schools. The activity since then has been both intense and promising. And a lot remains to be done.
Conceptions of literacy, far from being static, change with the times. They respond to emerging political and economic circumstances, shifting cultural values and novel technological possibilities. Notions of literacy are shaped by history and shape history in return. They change at any given time -- in what is understood to be the substance of literacy, who is supposed to be literate and for what purpose. Needless to say, these are tightly linked.
As the liberal-arts view of literacy evolved, it designated the studies suitable for those freemen in society charged with thinking and governing or advising those who did. Eventually, it became codified in the trivium (studies in grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). By the Middle Ages, church scholars -- who especially needed to be literate, given their responsibility for preserving knowledge of the past -- relied on the trivium and quadrivium, plus Latin, Arabic and Greek. But Gutenberg changed that. As the Renaissance matured, the liberal arts came to be seen as those studies which imparted a broad liberal education -- and hence literacy -- in contrast to a vocational or specialized one. The numbers of people who had reason to read, could read and had access to reading material expanded.
In the 19th century, the industrial revolution and creeping democracy accelerated the trend toward universal education. In 1870, England set the pattern with the Foster Education Act guaranteeing a basic education for all. Women's suffrage and other egalitarian movements of the 20th century, accompanied by rapid technology-driven social and economic changes, and the effects of two world wars, fostered similar advances in the U.S. and most industrialized countries. But if more widespread literacy is in the wind, no longer to be the sole property of an elite, there is little unanimity on how it is to be defined. Should it be in the liberal arts tradition though it must fit everyone, or in the practical tradition because it must?
There is one current answer in The National Adult Literacy Study, a project mandated by Congress, carried out by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and published in 1995. It defined literacy as "using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals and to develop one's knowledge and potential." It used three scales to quantify adult literacy: Prose Literacy, Document Literacy and Quantitative Literacy. The study's conception of adult literacy was severely utilitarian and emphasized the practical skills of everyday life. Some examples from the study: Prose literacy indicators range from Level 1, "Identify the country in a short article" to Level 5, "Interpret a brief phrase from a lengthy news article." Over the same range of Level 1 to 5, document literacy went from "Locate time of meeting on a form" to "Use a table to compare credit cards; identify the two categories used and write two differences between them," and quantitative literacy requirements ranged from "Total a bank deposit entry" to "Use information in news article to calculate difference in time for completing a race."
Of all the adults tested, 21 percent were found to be in the lowest level of prose literacy and only 3 percent in the highest. The corresponding figures for document literacy were 23 percent and 3 percent. For quantitative literacy, the figures were 22 percent and 4 percent. Scores tend to rise with education level, but by these measures the top 25 percent of high school graduates without further education scored higher than the lowest 25 percent of college graduates.
This conception of adult literacy postulates degrees of literacy that are useful for some purposes -- although it is not clear that there ought to be an upper limit. An alternate conception of literacy, one that for other purposes may be more useful, is to characterize literacy in terms of the minimum knowledge and skill an individual would need to be considered literate in any given domain. This is the view we take in discussing science literacy.
While the definition of adult literacy in the ETS report speaks of "knowledge that is needed," the knowledge that counts is clearly process knowledge rather than content knowledge -- knowledge of how to do something rather than knowledge of something. The functionalist conception of literacy calls for no particular knowledge of the arts, humanities or sciences. The liberal-arts tradition, on the other hand, tends to place emphasis on the acquisition of understandings and insights and certain skills associated with its various domains. Our view reflects both the traditional liberal-arts definition and the functional one, but with far more emphasis than in the ETS study on what knowledge characterizes literacy.
The most ambitious effort to date to spell out what constitutes science literacy was initiated in 1985 and the findings were reported in the volume Science for All Americans, published by Oxford University Press in 1989 and revised in 1993. The study was funded entirely by the Carnegie Corporation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the scientific society that produced it, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The report claims no authority other than that inherent in a study by five independent national science panels meeting frequently for two years and writing recommendations that were reviewed critically by a large and diverse array of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, historians of science, and educators. Science for All Americans (SFAA) is essentially a definition of adult science literacy that makes sense, which may explain why it has received the attention of many countries in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, and of international organizations such as OECD and UNESCO.
"The portrayal of science literacy in SFAA is based on these premises: Science literacy includes understanding key concepts, principles and ways of thinking drawn from the natural and social sciences, mathematics and technology, not just from the basic school sciences. This is because today's scientific endeavor is shaped by the increasing interdependence of science, mathematics and technology even though each has its own character and history.
"Science literacy includes knowing that science, mathematics and technology are human enterprises and what that implies about their strengths and weaknesses. In that light, science literacy also implies being familiar with some of the ways in which the science endeavor connects to other human endeavors such as literature, history, the arts (practical as well as aesthetic), work and governance.
"Nonscientists need not be competent at doing science in order to be literate in science. Most adults have no call to design and carry out controlled experiments any more than being literate in music, say, means being able to compose a satisfactory violin concerto. What is essential is that everyone be familiar enough with how science works to be able to respond critically to claims, often spurious, made in the name of science, mathematics (especially statistics and probability) and technology.
"Science literacy is best expressed as a coherent set of understandings (content knowledge) and skills. This is in contrast to setting out a conceptually disaggregated collection of concepts and terms, as in E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s popular Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, or, for that matter, in a dictionary or encyclopedia. The criteria for determining what one needs to know and be able to do to be considered science-literate should be both utilitarian and philosophical. Science literacy should be useful in everyday ways, enhancing one's employment prospects and ability to make personal decisions. It should help citizens participate intelligently in making social and political decisions on matters involving science and technology. But there is more to it than that: Knowledge of science should -- like great literature -- contribute to the ability and inclination of people to ponder, on occasion, the enduring questions of human meaning -- our origin, place in the universe and significance.
"One of the two great adventures of our times (i.e., of the last three centuries or so) is science -- the other, surely, being democracy. Almost daily it casts new light on who we are, where we are, how we came to be here, where we are headed, and, in its romance with technology, it has much to do with how we live our daily lives.
"Finally, establishing a threshold of knowledge and skill is more helpful than creating a continuum of competence if, as in this case, the reason for defining science literacy is to provide schools with an ambitious but attainable set of learning goals for all children to reach by the time they graduate from high school. Without a well-defined floor, it is too difficult to decide what is essential since a distribution of results -- the inevitable curve -- does not make clear what is unacceptably low. Literacy is not about how knowledgeable people can be or how ignorant some are but about what is necessary for living a satisfying and responsible life, and, educationally, what is to be expected of all students.
"With these criteria in mind, the basic dimensions of scientific literacy, as set forth in Science for All Americans, can be summarized in four general categories: The scientific endeavor, scientific views of the world, perspectives on science, and scientific habits of mind."
Extracts from Science for All Americans that follow illustrate aspects of scientific literacy. Individuals literate in science are aware of the scientific endeavor and how it relates to their culture and their lives. They would, for example, be aware of the following:
"The scientific endeavor stems from the union of science, mathematics and technology. Technology provides science and mathematics with tools and techniques that are essential for inquiry and often suggests new lines of investigation. In the past, new technologies were based on accumulated practical knowledge, but today they are more often based on a scientific understanding of the principles that underlie how things behave. Mathematics is itself a science, but it also provides the chief language of the sciences and a powerful analytical tool widely used in both science and technology.
"The various sciences differ from one another somewhat in subject matter and technique, yet they share certain values, philosophical views about knowledge and ways of learning about the world. All of the sciences presume that the things and events in the universe occur in consistent patterns that are comprehensible through careful and systematic study. Although they all aim at producing verifiable knowledge, none of them claims to produce knowledge that is absolutely true and beyond change.
"Whether theoretical or applied, mathematics is a creative process rather than one of using memorized rules to calculate answers. Mathematical processes include representing some aspects of things abstractly, manipulating the abstractions logically to find new relationships between them and seeing whether the new relationships say something useful about the original things. The things studied in this way may be objects, collections, events, processes, ideas, numbers or other mathematical abstractions.
"In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, senses and minds. Engineering is a process of designing and building technological systems to achieve such changes. Engineers must take into account physical, economic, political, social, ecological, aesthetic and ethical considerations and make trade-offs among them."
Knowledge of certain concepts and principles of science is valuable for everyone because it makes the world more comprehensible and more interesting. To that end, persons who are science-literate will be familiar with, among others, the following concepts from SFAA:
"The structure and evolution of the universe, with emphasis on the similarity of materials and forces found everywhere in it, the power of a few general principles (such as universal gravitation and the conservation of energy) to make sense of it and ways in which the universe is investigated.
"The general features of the planet earth, including its location, motion, origin and resources; the dynamics by which its surface is shaped and reshaped; the effect of living organisms on its surface and atmosphere; and how its landform, oceans and rivers, climate and resources have influenced where and how people live, and how human history has unfolded.
"The basic concepts related to matter, energy, force and motion, with emphasis on their use in models to explain a vast and diverse array of natural phenomena from the birth of stars to the behavior of cells.
"The rich diversity of the earth's organisms and the surprising similarity in the structure and functions of their cells, the dependence of species on each other and on the physical environment, and the flow of matter and energy through the cycles of life. Biological evolution is a concept based on extensive geological and molecular evidence, as an explanation for the diversity and similarity of life forms and as a central organizing principle for all of biology. The basic structure and functioning of the human body, seen as a system of cells and organs that serve the fundamental functions of deriving energy from food, protection against injury, internal coordination and reproduction.
"The nature of technologies, including agriculture, with emphasis on both the agricultural revolution in ancient times and the effects on 20th-century agricultural productivity of the use of biological and chemical technologies; the acquisition, processing, and use of materials and energy, with particular attention to both the Industrial Revolution and the current revolution in manufacturing based on the use of computers; and information processing and communications, with emphasis on the impact of computers and electronic communications on contemporary society."
Science literacy also includes seeing the scientific endeavor in the light of cultural and intellectual history and being familiar with some powerful ideas that cut across the landscape of science, mathematics and technology. Examples include:
"An awareness that scientific views of the world result both from a combination of incremental changes consisting of many small discoveries that accumulate over long periods of time and, more rarely, revolutionary changes that quickly and dramatically transform ways of thinking about the world.
"Familiarity with some of the episodes in the history of science and technology that are of surpassing significance for our cultural heritage. These include discoveries about the planetary earth, universal gravitation, relativity, geologic time, plate tectonics, the conservation of matter and the creation of modern chemistry, radioactivity and nuclear fission, the evolution of species, germs as a source of disease and the industrial revolution.
"Some important conceptual themes -- systems, models, constancy and change, and scale -- pervade science, mathematics and technology and appear over and over again, whether we are looking at an ancient civilization, the human body or a comet. They transcend disciplinary boundaries and prove fruitful in explanation, in theory, in observation and in design."
To be scientifically literate is to possess, at least to a degree, some of the values, attitudes and skills characteristic of science. Some examples of these are:
"Respect for the use of evidence and logical reasoning in making arguments; honesty, curiosity, and openness to new ideas; and skepticism in evaluation of claims and arguments.
"Computational skills, including the ability to make certain mental calculations rapidly and accurately; to perform calculations using paper and pencil and electronic calculators; and to estimate approximate answers when appropriate and to check on the reasonableness of other computations.
"Communication skills, including the ability to express basic ideas, instructions, and information clearly both orally and in writing; to organize information in tables and simple graphs and to draw rough diagrams.
"Critical-response skills that enable people to judge carefully the assertions -- especially those that invoke the mantle of science -- made by advertisers, public figures, organizations, and the entertainment and news media, and to subject their own claims to the same kind of scrutiny so as to become less bound by prejudice and rationalization."
The rendition of adult science literacy found in Science for All Americans and summarized here is the first step in the AAAS program to reform elementary and secondary education in science, mathematics and technology. The launching of this reform effort in 1985 happened to coincide with the approach of Halley's Comet. That prompted musings about what the world will be like in 2061, the date of Halley's next return, and the recognition that the quality of life on the planet then will depend greatly on the character and quality of education received by the children entering school that year. Hence, the name of the reform effort: Project 2061.
Following publication of Science for All Americans, Project 2061 transformed the vision of the study into recommendations for what students will need to learn in school to become literate in science. This effort involved more than four years of AAAS-directed collaboration between teams of teachers and scientists and resulted in the publication of Benchmarks for Science Literacy in 1993 by Oxford University Press. The volume spells out in detail what all students should know and be able to do in science, mathematics and technology by grades 2, 5, 8 and 12. Today, it is used by 32 states and several hundred school districts to define curriculum frameworks in science. It is also being used by the National Academy of Sciences in formulating national science-education standards.
Meanwhile, Project 2061 is currently engaged in producing additional resources for further reform of science teaching in America's schools. All indications point to eventual success, if, that is, future efforts continue to be as vigorous and persistent as those of the last 10 years. The work still to be done, needless to say, is very great indeed.
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