Talk:Scientific literacy

Beefed up new page
Added citations, references to other sources and wikified page. Also added categories. Alex Jackl 04:16, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions
It seems like it might be worth mentioning the push to educate students in the STEM fields in this article, as the NSF is involved in those efforts. It also seems like the article could use a more international perspective, as most of it is focused on scientific literacy in the USA. --Driefler (talk) 17:36, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Correct, I'm going to try and figure out how to put this kind of "tag" in the articleKlandri (talk) 01:35, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I found the right tag. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:42, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Most Unfortunate
I don't have time to deal with this but the basic fact a person would want to know, what is the numerical rate of scientific literacy in various populations is here linked to broken links and in the various studies occluded and obfuscated. Typically you are finding surveys asking whether people think the sun is the center of the solar system, whether human beings evolved, and so forth and everything is skewed to middle schoolers rather than adult populations. If you assume that full prose proficiency is required for scientific literacy, large studies have shown that in the general U.S. population this is below 20% for the adult white population, as judged by testing with materials that would be encountered in everyday life. So there's a general ignoring of the question of actual scientific literacy in favor of some kind of fuzzy opinion research on how many flat earthers, creationists, climate change deniers, etc. there are. Pitiful but if someone wants to put in the time I'm pretty sure you'll find that the numbers are quite a bit lower than what comes back from these surveys. Roughly 15% in the EU and North America is probably being generous. A few places such as Singapore, Japan, Estonia, etc. may be significantly higher. As a world wide value probably in the quite low single digits, if your standard was say the ability to read an issue of Nature. The underlying hard truth is the ignorant are easier to rule by appeal to their emotions and prejudices than people that can think for themselves rationally, so politics generally has encouraged or at the very least tolerated ignorance rather than confront and call it out for what it is, a gross failure of human being. Indeed, it, politics, whether authoritarian or democratic, thrives on it and is essentially a reflection of it.98.4.124.117 (talk) 03:19, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Still no numbers and now apparently mostly dead linked sources ...
.. since I made the above remark. FWIW, it can be inferred that with modestly rigorously criteria such as assuming full prose proficiency is a requirement for scientific literacy, the rate in the US and OECD countries for the general adult population, as a single fuzzy estimate, is in the low teens at most. Lycurgus (talk)
 * I don't really have time to do the research, but the dead links were easily fixed using the Wayback Machine (if you want to know how to do it yourself in future, read Link rot). RockMagnetist(talk) 19:00, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Familiar with it (wayback/inet archive and the supporting automation here); the research wouldn't be worth performing for presentation here, because the construction of a figure such as my surmise above would be considered OR, since the available statistics aren't oriented toward that level of salience, they are oriented toward school performance, specific questions etc. Smart of you not to bother. Generally the figures that are available are based on the percent that accept evolution, know the earth goes around the sun and not the reverse, or other basic single facts and are several times what daily experience indicates is the case in the sense I said. 98.4.103.219 (talk) 21:22, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Science
Scientific literacy or science literacy encompasses written, numerical, and digital literacy as they pertain to understanding science, its methodology, observations, and theories. Scientific literacy is chiefly concerned with an understanding of the scientific method, units and methods of measurement, empiricism and understanding of statistics in particular correlations and qualitative versus quantitative observations and aggregate statistics, as well as a basic understanding of core scientific fields, such as physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, geology and computation. 115.147.12.243 (talk) 15:23, 3 August 2022 (UTC)