Via scientificblogging, a new survey reveals something about how much people understand about the natural world. A survey carried out by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences discovered, among other things, that
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 Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
and, to get more specific
… less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet’s water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%)
Like many scientists, I do feel that there is something deeply depressing about numbers like this. However, I can’t help but feel that such surveys don’t get to the heart of the problem. Certainly the first two questions are things any person should know – not because they’re wonderful at remembering facts, but because an understanding of the underlying science should be a basic part of any education. But a focus on having numbers on the tip of one’s tongue isn’t really what science literacy is all about.
What we really lack is a population that is educated in scientific and critical thinking and problem solving. It really doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t know a specific answer to a question, as long as they know where to look for the answer, and how to understand the data and reasoning behind the correct number. Most importantly, they need the tools to be able to distinguish a robust answer from one that isn’t backed by any solid arguments.
Undoubtedly, most people would perform depressingly poorly on that kind of measure also. That’s the problem we need to tackle.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:27 am
It’s worse than that. While some are simply lacking these critical reasoning skills (I count myself among the subset that could certainly use improvement), others are downright hostile to it. Part of the problem appears to be the inability to gauge expectations of scientific information appropriately, an inability that isn’t entirely their fault. On the one hand, we’ve got science frequently touted (inappropriately) as the golden path to pure truth. On the other, we’ve got a barrage of media-friendly reports about sundry mistakes, ambiguities, uncertainties, even rare acts of fraud, coming out of the scientific sphere. The correct understanding is that science may be the most reliable way to gain knowledge about the natural world, but it’s still only the least imperfect process human beings have at their disposal to get answers. Typically most scientists never claim otherwise, but people want certainty, and the media wants sexy soundbites, and the reality of the scientific process gets horribly distorted. Meanwhile, you’ve got the snake-oil peddlers speaking to the masses with great authority and self-importance, and this ostentatiousness and pomposity, which any good scientists should rightly avoid like a disease, proves the more persuasive to a large segment of the lay public. People cope with reports of, say, drug companies withholding data and doctors faking studies, by running completely in the opposite direction. They commonly react by jumping on homeopathic or new-age nonsense as the cure to their ills, because the “alternative medicine” practitioners do a good job of pointing out The Establishment’s very real flaws while completely bamboozling their consumers about the complete inefficacy and potential danger of their approach. And those consumers are all the more happy for being had, apparently. A very similar phenomenon characterizes a common response to the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Disclosure about uncertainty breeds distrust, while outright lies to the contrary, if promoted with vehemence and indignation, are almost irresistible to popular consumption.
Time and again, science seems to lose the psychological battle. I’ve yet to see or dream up a good solution to the problem. It is depressing, and I’m stumped for remedies that stick, at least on the scale of human generations. I suppose unwavering patience and relentless vigilance are the only reliable methods, and progress must be measured in centuries rather than the months or years that seem, at the outside, more reasonable and advisable.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:29 am
[...] Everyone should know about science! This is a must read . . . [...]
March 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Mark, I like that you included “critical thinking” in your critique of current scientific literacy. CT is not taught enough in schools, especially the lower levels (where it does need to be!)
March 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Hi Mark–
Yes, scientific literacy has nothing to do with trying to be a walking encyclopedia. There is very little agreement on what exactly is meant by “scientific literacy” among the education research (and probably scientific) community, but I think most would agree that it’s NOT winning at “Trivial Pursuit.”
And, what about the good news from this survey??? About 4 out of 5 believe that scientific research is important and critical to the US success in a variety of ways–hurrah and huzzah for that! Have a good weekend!
Georgia
March 13th, 2009 at 9:36 am
“It really doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t know a specific answer to a question, as long as they know where to look for the answer, and how to understand the data and reasoning behind the correct number. Most importantly, they need the tools to be able to distinguish a robust answer from one that isn’t backed by any solid arguments.”
I couldn’t agree more. Can you please point this out to the physics and astronomy graduate schools that base admission decisions largely on physics GRE scores? Thanks.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:04 am
If somebody asks me a question like this I get suspicious and think it’s some kind of a trick question. Maybe 40% of the survey respondents thought they are being fooled?
March 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am
It’s far more important to inculcate reasoning and intuitive skills into people than scientific mindset or scientific knowledge. This is partly because the trivial facts that you criticize adults for not knowing can be easily accessed by them should such facts ever become important (even Wikipedia can handle that sort of investigation)–the amount of time that schools waste trying to force students to memorize such trivialities when they could instead be helping students become genuinely more skilled and effective people is absurd.
But more importantly, while we do a wonderful job of indoctrinating our scientists and engineers into the Modern school of philosophical thought (which is vital for their particular disciplines), we shouldn’t pretend that it’s the only valid school of thought or the only valid means of finding knowledge. Modernism has its place, both in our schools and in our lives, but a complete education should include its alternatives (post-modernism being the most ready example, though not the only one). For that matter, our scientists should also keep the limitations of their worldview in mind.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Mark, I would agree with almost everything you wrote. My only point of contention concerns your
singling out of question 3. Surely question 1 is also of the same type, having a number at ones
fingertips?
I would say that having a knowledge of basic numbers describing the universe around us IS an
essential element of critical thinking. Knowing that roughly 71% (heck, even 3/4 would be fine) of
the Earth’s surface is covered with water gives one such a sense of perspective on so many aspects of life. Knowing some numbers offhand generally has several effects
1) It gives one a sense of scale and perspective that can be immediately called upon.
2) It allows for immediate comparisons to be made
3) It tends to make one more observant of numbers around you.
Anyway, my 2p worth.
Adrian
March 13th, 2009 at 10:25 am
At the risk of appearing reactionary, I’d suggest that there
are some facts about the world that educated people should
just know. Knowing that the Earth goes around the Sun once
a year is certainly a good one, as is knowing that a year is 365
days.
We’ll shortchange people if we don’t teach people a common
set of knowledge that literate laypeople should know. They
won’t be able to read newspaper articles as easily if they don’t.
They won’t be able to read books as easily if they don’t. Sure,
you can read facts in encyclopedias, but that isn’t as useful as
knowing them off the top of your head.
In particular, it is very hard to teach people to be critical
thinkers if they don’t have some basic facts at their disposal.
Of course, maybe the problem is indeed that people are
learning too many little facts and not remembering the big
ones.
But in any case, count me as somebody who *is* worried
about those statistics, for their own sake.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Unfortunatly, if you think about it, almost half the people you know are of below average inteligence.
and there in lies the rub
March 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Im not sure these kinds of questions get at the heart of what it is to be science literate–facts are something that can always be looked up (and forgotten.)
I think science literacy is knowing what science is all about and roughly its implications in society. I once heard science literacy defined as simply “the ability to read the Science section of the New York Times.”
Might i suggest another definition–to participate in a science blog conversation without being mauled…..
March 13th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Reminds me of the “fact test” Edison subjected Einstein and others to, and Einstein’s response that “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,”
In other words, critical thinking.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Lack of working literacy is not limited to science; I’ve seen similar surveys about geographic literacy. Something like 50% of American adults can’t point out the United States on a map. Admittedly, I can’t point out Kuala Lumpur without looking it up, but I do know where my own country is. The bottom line is that many Americans do not retain much of their education, whether it’s about science, history, and other topics.
Speaking of which, who remembers what a gerund is?
March 13th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Who cares if they got the answers wrong, as long as they give 110% effort?
March 13th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Casey Jane,
I would amend that definition of science literacy to be “the ability to read and understand the Science section of the New York Times”. If you don’t know some basic facts, then the understanding bit can be very hard.
So, whilst I would agree that knowing the wavelength of the Lyman alpha line is probably not something everyone, or even every physicist or astronomer, should know, I would expect people to have a general ballpark estimate for the fraction of the Earth’s surface covered by oceans.
Adrian
March 13th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Those are not science questions, those are knowledge questions. I can’t even answer the one on % fresh water.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I disagree that these items are simply minutia to be spewed forth wrote. Certainly a bit of fact-based knowledge is required, but if the specific facts weren’t known, one would hope they could be deduced from others even less esoteric. People can’t make the connection between a year and one revolution around the sun, or the significance of that for the annual cycle of seasons? People have no sense at all that humans are a much, much younger species than the dinosaurs (some of which evolved into flying birds long before the first hominids existed)? One can’t picture a globe and make a guestimate about the water coverage?
March 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
eh, rote…
March 13th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Excellent post, I couldn’t agree more. It has always seemed to me that learning who to listen to is the real key. If societ loses this skill, science in particular is in danger of being shouted down
March 13th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Casey Jane & Adrian Burd: I often explicitly state Adrian’s version regarding the science section of the New York times as being one of the main goals of my intro classes.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I also couldn’t find Kuala Lampur (or half the “-stan” countries), but I know exactly where my atlas is. I’m stunned at the numbers of my neighbors who don’t even own a dictionary, let alone any other basic reference materials. The lack of scientific literacy is tied to a simple lack of curiosity, which is a trait I can’t even fathom. What else makes life interesting?
March 13th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Feynman once said “There is a difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something” and that’s the problem! No one cares!!! They are all clones on the death star, they don’t know how it works but they know they are there. Personally, I’d like to think that I’m a curious Tie Fighter pilot who was drafted! Now are we wrong for wanting to know or are they wrong for not caring? That’s the $64,000 question! I know I’m not the most intelligent person in the world (without spellcheck I would be legally stewpid!) but I cant help but be struck by the wonderment of nature and it’s mysteries. Is that wrong? In our society for far too long we Hero’s (that’s right I said it!) have been mocked and judged for “Knowing stuff”! But fear not Comrades redemption is near. Our quest for truth* is at it’s zenith and we will triumph! Before the Postindustrial Revolution, science could be ignored and even discarded; not anymore. The masses are becoming more and more aware of the truth (Wikipedia) which plays to our advantage, heart surgery doesn’t perform itself, IPods aren’t magic musicy boxes, plastic isn’t mined from the earth, and a year is 365 days for a reason. Scientific reasoning gave us technology and technology is the interpreter to the masses, that’s right foes** your morning grande fat free extra whip latte is a gift from some clever and highly caffeinated Scientists… And that’s the poop***! Now for a quick tale of my story. I too was once in the dark, I know I know and for that I am sorry, but I hit my own Scientific Revelation not too long ago and I am not looking back! And there are more like me, it’s working (slowly but surely).
* Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici — cheesy I know; but valid.
** Loosely used term, I really don’t think of nonbelievers as foes.
*** Look it up!
March 13th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I guess an extreme example, albeit fictional, of favouring critical thinking over rote learning was Sherlock Holmes.
Didn’t his sidekick Watson once mention some elementary astronomical fact to him, such as pointing out that the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the other way round, only to be rebuked for burdening him with useless information which he would forthwith try and forget?
March 13th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Are they counting the polar ice caps as “fresh water?”
3% seems to be a bit on the largish side…
March 13th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I once taught a senior physics class in which no one knew how many weeks there were in a year. When I told them that it was the same number of cards in a deck, they did not know that either. I retired just a few months later.
March 13th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
I’m wondering if anyone besides me dislikes the ubiquitous phrase “critical thinking”, especially when thought of as a “skill that should be taught in school”. I’m not even sure what people are talking about here. Has education in the past few decades really changed so fundamentally that “critical thinking” (whatever it might be) was once taught in school but for some reason no longer is? I would bet that essentially anyone who is considered to possess good “critical thinking skills”, attained those skills mostly from dealing with life in general (both in and out of school) rather than from specific “critical thinking” exercises invented by some educator. How many adults look back and say something like, “Ah yes, until I took Ms Bader’s algebra class my critical thinking skills were sorely lacking”?
Parents know only too well how adept their kids become at constructing arguments for why they (the kids) should be allowed to do such and such, buy this or that, etc. Children are constantly arguing, analyzing, evaluating, scheming, predicting, and so on. Surely, it’s this constant dealing with life that develops “critical thinking” far more than, say, having a science teacher spend a few days on “the scientific method” and then give the students an assignment where the poor students must gather data, construct a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, blah, blah, ….
I’m not saying that 12 or more years of schooling doesn’t play a role in developing “critical thinking” but I imagine that most of the development comes from students thinking about how to get the best grade for the least amount of work, or predicting what the consequences will be if they skip class or fail to turn in an assignment, or deciding whether or not to hang out with so and so, or…(fill in any one of a hundred other challenges faced by kids at school). Just weigh all those challenges against Mr. Jones saying, “OK, class, now we’re going to do an exercise in critical thinking….” (ARG!)
March 13th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I have never believed these surveys about how nobody knows anything. If someone called me up and asked “Who is the the Vice President?” or “How many times a year does the Earth go around the Sun?”, I would certainly play along. Really, if you ask dumb questions, then you deserve to get dumb answers.
March 13th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Another recent depressing statistic is that only ~55% of the country has at least a HS diploma. My own brother resides in that database, and firmly believes that Rush = God.
Lets get real..the primary fault of democracy is simply the credo that `Majority Rules’ is the best possible model for govnt. Sounds great in print, but the last 8 yrs has been a ringing indictment of democracy on that basis. The `majority’ is basically ignorant of the basic tenets of science, is proud of it, distrusts those that are not, and believes in a world view that is medieval. Worse still, we scientists & educators go around naievely believing that we can change that. 40 yrs of failure emphatically reverberate : “No way”.
A few percent or so perhaps, but my post-sputnik generation was the first to receive those infamous shots-in-the-arm known as `PSSC’(Physical Science Study Committee), and the `New Math’ (set theory). Neither approach has worked after 4-decades of valiant effort. It is a lost cause.
As such, we must seriously question historical orthodoxy & ask: Is democracy a failure in this regard ? Might not at least western civilization be better off without majority rule ? Do we really want the Bushian majority to rule & vector the course of future history ? It sounds heretical, but maybe democracy has failed, and it’s time to ask if there is a viable alternative, in which leaders are NOT chosen on the basis of their appeal to a majority ignorant of basic science & mathematics ?
March 14th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
The 3% figure of fresh water apparently includes ground and atmospheric water as well. It’s also a bit of a misleading question asked right after “what percent of the planet is covered by water” as you’ll start thinking in terms of percent of ground covered and lakes can seem to be quite a nice percentage of the world’s surface (though it’s probably pretty low as well, but how can I know without measuring it? mental bias sets in here).
If you think science is about what people are being taught in high school or lower then you’re wrong anyway. I’ve not been to a US high school but to all accounts I’ve heard it was just like mine: sit there and accept the facts. This plays into this idea of science as the deliverer of golden truth. Perhaps what people really need to learn in high school is some basic epistemology.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Adrian Burd
“Mark, I would agree with almost everything you wrote. My only point of contention concerns your
singling out of question 3. Surely question 1 is also of the same type, having a number at ones
fingertips? ”
Umm! The time taken for the earth to move round the sun is one year. That is the definition of a year. I would check your own scientific scientific literacy.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
When did the Earth start revolving around the Sun, instead of its axis?
March 14th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
chemicalscum
“I would check your own scientific scientific literacy.”
Thank you for pointing that out – I will certainly do so.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:01 am
[...] There’s a post over on cosmic variance that asks the question What is Scientific Literacy? Some of the comments reminded me of a book review I did for Nature a while ago, so I thought [...]
March 16th, 2009 at 6:59 am
I don’t see anything really alarming here. I wish people could have at least answered a year on the first question, but I don’t think it shows anything other than a knowledge retention problem. After schooling is done, people get absorbed into their daily routine and forget most of this stuff. I’ve only been out of school for 10 years, went through math up through Diff EQ, and I couldn’t do a derivative without looking things up now. I swear I lose an IQ point every time I open up Excel
Critical thinking is the key. I don’t think our problem is that bad though. A better test would be to give a random group of people a problem solving exercise based on their current work activities. To pull a number out of nowhere, I’d guess 30 – 40% of people would do OK. I’m not so sure we can really fault people for not having the curiosity to learn about a lot of things outside of their immediate experiences. Society seems to be driving us into ever more specialized roles.
March 16th, 2009 at 8:06 am
“Unfortunatly, if you think about it, almost half the people you know are of below average inteligence.”
Say what? (I wanted to write “Que?” in the style of Manuel from Barcelona but couldn’t
find the upside-down question mark.) Assuming the people you know are a fair sample,
then it would be exactly half, within the statistical error. (We don’t have to think about
median, mean, mode etc since to first order, IIRC, the distribution of IQ is Gaussian.)
There is a story about President Eisenhower being extremely surprised when an aide
remarked that half the U.S. population is below average in intelligence. We need a
way to get most of our population up to over average in intelligence! Like those spam
emails saying “We’ve managed to get thousands of websites into the top 10!”. On the
other hand, the people you know are probably not a fair sample.
March 18th, 2009 at 10:14 am
…that science-literacy ’survey’ by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences is itself a prime example of science ignorance.
It claims to use the science of statistical-sampling to measure the scientific-literacy of adult Americans. But it’s actual methodology so shockingly incompetent … that the survey & conclusions are worthless.
95% of the people originally selected as the ‘random sample’ for the telephone survey did NOT participate in the survey or results. (Non-Response Rate was 95%)
Most Americans these days are tired of telemarketers & pollsters annoying phone calls — and will not cooperate.
And cell-phone-only Americans are usually excluded entirely.
Since the pollsters were not even close to getting a scientific random-sample… their conclusions on the scientific-literacy of the overall American adult population have NO scientific validity — a total joke on those who take the “results” at face value.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:46 am
It just scares me when someone who finished high school and a Bachelors degree in Arts asks me about the veracity of the claims on, for example, this website: http://projectcamelot.org/big_picture.html. That a fairly well educated person can’t distinguish truth from outrageous fiction is highly disturbing.
It is even more unsettling that as a group, people lacking of critical thought could be swayed into believing there is just cause for mass hysteria, which could have a very real impact on society: sudden changes in the economy, crime rates, etc. So while one such person may evoke our sympathy, I think we need to guard against chaos through better education.