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US Adults Fail Basic Science Literacy
TaeKwonDood writes "Do you want the bad news first or the good news? The good news is that about 80% of Americans think science knowledge is 'very important' to our future. The bad news is most of those people think it's up to someone else to get knowledgeable. Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number) and over 40% think dinosaurs and humans cavorted together like in some sort of 'Land Of The Lost' episode. What to do? Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense. Yes, it will enrage the teachers' union, but it might inspire better people to go into science teaching. It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."
Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number)...
47%? Last I heard, it was between 70-75%. The top three results from Google for the query "earth covered by water" all say that as well.
Was that 47% derived using a different definition, or is TaeKwonDood a charter member of the Science Is Only For Nerds Club?
Boards of Education are trying to teach how a magic man in the sky created everything. Reap what you sow.
Than revealing of any particular scientific knowledege.
Maybe we just need better survey education.
50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun
Heresy! Everyone knows the sun revolves around the Earth, and it takes 6,000 years for it to pass around all four corners.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
You know, I'll own up to not knowing that it was exactly 47% of the earth that was covered with water. I actually thought it was a lot closer to 70%, and, apparently, so does Google, so its a common misconception. I wonder if one of us isn't counting ice?
You know what though, even if the number is 47%, I don't think that knowing that number means anything. That's a piece of trivia; maybe an oceanographer would use that number in his or her daily life, but that's about it.
Lot of education in this country is about trivia and trivialities. Why force someone to memorize a worthless factoid? And why judge their scientific literacy by the number of factoids they know?
I say we take the trivia out of science education, and put the scientific method in. People need critical thinking skills, and problem solving methodologies a hell of a lot more than they need pi to 20 digits, or to be able name our current geologic epoch (Holocene), or any of a number of worthless pieces of trivia.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
78.34517937859604837% of statistics are made up on the spot...
Seriously, is anyone surprised?
What concerns me more than lack of knowledge of basic facts is that many adults don't really understand something as simple and basic as "the scientific method"...coming up with idea...testing it...controls....etc. It's almost as if science is "magic" to a lot of adults...might explain why so many can't distinguish between what they think the bible says and testable, provable fact.
There's a simple way to have the best teachers rewarded appropriately - you completely eliminate government schools. The cream will rise to the top in the private-sector schools, as it does now.
But then politicians wouldn't be able to take credit for it.
Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number)...
I understand pointing out that ridiculous number of people who fail basic science literacy. But we also shouldn't ignore the high number of people who do poorly in basic English literacy, of which TaeKwonDood is one. That sentence above falls apart in a number of ways.
This guy's the limit!
the earth was fully covered with water, right before god created dry land and put all the fossils which seem to be older inside. The he created the animals in a way that their DNA looks like inherited from each other and created some species which are there to prove that he can also create species which evolve. All this is kind of obvious, so what are your irrelevant anti-christian scientific questions all about?
America's been behind the rest of the world in education for quite a while. I thought No Child Left Behind was supposed to fix this.
Human beings are just so damn interesting.
"scientific method" is crap. Everyone knows science is settled by consensus, and if you disagree and try to bring up new evidence, you're just being a denier and should probably be arrested.
You can pay teachers all you want, but it wont inspire students to learn and retain knowledge. Only parents/peers/culture can do that.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My one problem with the idea of merit pay for teachers is that there isn't really a good way to measure teacher merit. In most jobs, a worker has a very high degree of control over the end product: for example, nothing goes into the source code I write unless I say so. In such
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
The other option that has been put forward is to use evaluations, by peers, students, administrators, or other factors. Subjectivity is the problem here: it's far too easy to game such evaluations, or to subject them to office politics. This can have both positive and negative effects on various parties, depending on viewpoint, but in any case it cannot be made fair or reliable as a measure of performance.
What other methods exist? I can see none, and would be interested in hearing possible alternatives. But in their absence, "merit pay" for teachers is nothing more than a comforting myth: the concept is unworkable, and implementations cannot be made to reliably follow the concept. Yes, this is different from many (most?) jobs, but the nature of the job itself -also very different from most- is what creates these conditions.
Wouldn't that be geography, not science?
only 47% of people that read slashdot RTFA... 47% of adults gave the right rough estimate of between 65 and 75% of earths surface covered in water
I think our problems are primarily cultural and I really doubt merit pay for teachers is going to make a huge amount of difference. Giving teachers more money (based on some system that is assuredly going to be arbitrary at best) will not fix parents who are ignorant and apathetic.
On top of that we need people who are science experts. People with advanced degrees and even if we are giving our primary and secondary teachers bonuses how does that help the issue of young people who have no interest and see no future in careers in science? We keep cranking out film and psychology majors. And they are great to have around when retail places are doing a lot of hiring, but they don't really move the nation forward.
And all the while we will keep focusing on building up self-esteem of the children while Asia pushes right past us in every way that matters. The sun is setting on the American empire and this is just one more sign. How many science and engineering graduates is China cranking out a year? How does it compare to the U.S.? And where does future power lie in every category that matters? In knowledge.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
And what is said in the summary:
"Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water"
So there's a bit of idiocy with the person who wrote this. In reality, as you put it, 15% got the correct answer--15% did not necessarily "actually know how much of the planet is covered in water." That would imply that no one guessed. A little hypocrisy in the summary, perhaps? In the article, they put it correctly: "Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%."
EDITORS, DO YOUR JOBS. If there is a fallacy in the summary, either correct it, or DO NOT POST THE STORY.
science just isn't for everyone. if someone doesn't have the interest, ability, or inclination, what do you expect to do with them? not everyone is meant to be a great thinker. true scientific knowledge will always be the provenance of a scant few, in any society, in any time period. just let it be. these low rates of science knowledge don't surprise me and i see no problem here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Clearly too many people are playing Turok.
[Insert pithy quote here]
"How much of the earth's surface is covered by water?" Does one need to know the answer to within one percent, or less? Is that even known so precisely? If the correct answer is 70-75% water (approx 3/4) then are 4/5 and 2/3 water good enough guesses? I think both numbers contain the main idea that there's more water than land.
And as for humans and dinos walking the earth together, I think a majority of those who "didn't know dinos and humans didn't live at the same time" would probably have answered that dinos preceeded humans if asked on a gameshow where prizemoney was at stake. Answering that they thought dinos and humans walked the earth together makes is a statement about the beliefs they choose to espouse.
...
Most people don't do jobs that need this education. What they need are classes in logic, history and philosophy growing up because those will teach them to critically think more than any K-12 class on basic science.
1) How does this compare to Europe, where belief in all sorts of pseudo-science is running rampant?
2) What happens if you factor out the inner city underclass that so often drags down the numbers?
While the earth may be 70% covered with water, it is hard for me to imagine a useful application of that number. And 47% apparently came close to the right answer of a nearly useless fact.
Electricity, mechanics, chemistry and biology might see daily application. Even the speed of light is a bit I've used when calculating the length of a jury rigged antenna.
% of water on the surface of the earth is about as useful as the circumference of a bear.
t
Subby says: "Yes, it will enrage the teachers' union, but it might inspire better people to go into science teaching. It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."
If you believe that those are the only two options (either, or), you are science illiterate, too. That's called a "false dichotomy." Look it up.
The examples provided in the summary are useless. 100% of people know that they are not underwater, and ~99.9% of people are aware that dinosaurs are currently extinct.
If the facts are not relevant to a person's daily life or that person's career, who cares if they know the quantitative answer to a question? Let that person concentrate on information that can actually improve their lot in life, and stop quizzing them on trivia.
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge. If I need to know how much of the planet is covered in water (I'd guess 80%), I look it up, and decide if the definition matches my needs.
Scientific literacy would be understanding (1) how to research science you need (2) how to conduct a proper experiment (3) how to evaluate claims for obvious falsehood (4) how to check out non-obvious claims for falsehood, which is related to #1, (5) how to identify whether you are yourself competent in an area of science, or not, and (6) how to find someone who *is* competent, if necessary.
I hate it when people mistake factoids for science.
I hate it when people mistake popular blurbs for reason.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm a biology professor, and I can tell you that my kids in grade school know a lot of things my college students do not (including my bio students, who you would think might have a lifelong interest in the sciences). It's not that they aren't being taught, it's that they forget most of what they learn (this is the basis for the "Are you smarter than a 5th grader" show). I'm all for better science education, but I don't think better primary education is going to make this better. You can teach kids whatever you want, but if they don't find relevance for it in their lives they'll forget it. Even the cable stations that are supposed to be devoted to feeding an interest in science and nature (Discovery, Animal Planet) are full of shows about blowing stuff up and rescuing abused pets. There are very few ways in which science is treated as interesting and worthwhile in our culture outside of the classroom.
24 hours.
"The approximately correct answer range for this question was defined as anything between 65% and 75%. Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%."
So did any of those 32% who got it wrong give the even more accurate answer of 71% or even 70.9%? Did anyone say "two thirds", because that's accurate enough to give a general indication. Are they just talking about oceans? Are they including ice as water because that gives (or takes) an extra 10% or so?
to look beyond test scores and simple comparisons?
If you work in school systems in different parts of the world, you will notice a difference of purpose. American schools primarily socialize students so we can make this melting-pot country work; European schools, for example, are more academically oriented. They achieve this by tracking students based on test scores/ability into a tiered schooling system.
Trying to pit these differently run school systems against each other is an apples/oranges venture.
The only fact they list that I find all that troubling, is the "humans and dinosaurs" one. The reason I find it more disturbing, is that it could well reflect rejection of observed data regarding the history and development of our planet (i.e. rejection of science) rather than mere ignorance of a dicrete fact.
Runner up is the "time it takes the Earth to circle the sun"... that's a little mind-boggling.
While I would expect most adults to know that 70% of Earth is covered in water, it's really more trivia than science. (It's also silly IMO to distinguish 70% as "the exact number" while calling, say, 71% an approximation... but I digress.) You could understand and practice scientific thinking, maybe even in an advanced scientific field, and for some reason happen to not know that bit of information. It's not something a scientific mind will automatically reason to -- it's just soemthing we expect everyone will have been told. I guess since we figure the person who told them will have been teaching a science class at the time, that makes it a measure of scientific literacy?
...from a country, where knowing the alphabet backwards while being 6 years old makes you a genius:
http://www.fox19.com/global/story.asp?s=9825140
Our attempts at handicapping the bright students certainly don't help us compete.
Wow you mean UK has declined so much already?
I thought the UK was ahead by a bit more than that.
You fail at basic English so don't bag on the people that fail science. I know there has to be a better way to express "Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number)..." that doesn't give the end reader the impression that 47% of the surface area is water.
Q1: How many of them believe in astrology, Feng Shui, crystal power, and other crap?
Q2: How many of them know that the Earth is not flat, and is about 4.5 billion years old?
I would not be surprised if the answer to Q1 is larger than the answer to Q2. Unfortunately. And that's just a sample of delusions compared to a couple of simple and well-known facts.
There is a crying need for teaching the scientific method in schools. Ideally, it would be accompanied by numerous exercises in critical thought, including the examination of "common knowledge" and topical news stories.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Recently in Houston, the teachers got 3,000 to 7,000 bonuses... meanwhile the supervisor got something like a 70,000 bonus. On top of a multi-hundred thousand dollar base pay.
Any system will be gamed.
The only way that science will take a front seat is for scientists and engineers to have high value to society so parents push their kids and then high school and college students push themselves because of the salary and prestige of the position.
Now-- realistically-- how likely is that? The wall street boom killed engineering and sciences. Layoffs and ghetto pay for science types buried them.
And that's not even considering that an indian or chinese student can get their degrees at a fraction of the price and who charge a fraction of the price for their labor.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Why you think it's bad to half a population is filled with idiots makes you and idiot, idiot!!
Why do you think "dumbfuck" is the number 1 word used?
(dumbfucks)
If only to make this comment visible...
The irony, in view of many of the comments, is that those immigrant employees come from countries or religions that do believe a god exists and created the world. And they're still smarter than you.
Stop blaming intelligent design for your children being stupid. ID has no effect on them not knowing how much water currently covers the earth.
This has been around for a while, but in case you haven't seen it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Science is the devil.
I would, as number (0) understanding what is and what isn't science.
Obvious example: "intelligent design"
hi!
What is a good teacher?
Is it a teacher whom passes the most students?
Is it a teacher whom scores highest on test?
Is it a teacher whom gives all his students
easier test so the students look smart, and
the teacher gets credit for passing students?
It seems the meaning of teacher merit will be the big issue. In my district, teachers are passing many kids that can't pass standardized test for their grades. It seems as if the no child left behind movement just pushed teachers to pass more students, not make sure they learned more.
You get what you pay for. Teachers generally come from the bottom 25% of their college graduating class. There are exceptions, of course, but not many in the math and science world.
The other big problem is that you can't get rid of the under performing teachers. Andy Rooney made a comment a while back that the best way to improve education in the US would be to go into every school and fire the three worst teachers. As he said, "Everyone knows who they are!" The students know, their fellow teachers know, and the administration knows. They just can't do anything about it. Students definitely don't think the teachers that challenge them with tough classes are bad teachers. They dislike the lazy idiots as much as anyone else.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I would, as number (0) understanding what is and what isn't science.
insert "add" after --would--
hi!
Nothing. If my neighbor only wants to learn about sports statistics and spend his days drinking beer or at his assembly line job, that's his prerogative.
Most people don't need a complex working knowledge of physics. They only need to know that hot things might burn you and so on. They're not building rockets. The problem comes from the fact that people won't trust scientists, either. If you don't understand science, and you don't trust the people who do to tell you what to do, then you're not going to be able to take advantage of the benefits of the scientific method, except indirectly (e.g. by purchasing products.)
The masses of asses have always been more concerned with scratching out an existence than controlling the universe. It's probably a good thing.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. O RLY? This is not proven as you can see - there is an approximately sixty-four-million-year gap in the fossil record when there are neither dinosaur nor human fossils. It's hard to find good citations because there's so much dizzy-headed creationist crap out there complicating the issue, but that period leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The problem with the fossil record, which Darwin recognized in Origin is that it's lumpy. It doesn't show us every stage, because everything that dies doesn't make a fossil. The statement that "humans and dinosaurs never coexisted" has always bothered me for that reason. It doesn't seem very scientific.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What a shame I spent all my modpoints yesterday downmodding infantile "correlation is not causation" comments. I'd mod this up.
Trivia or not, it doesn't change the fact that is "basic scientific information". Or at least, basic knowledge of the world that is useful, or at least interesting, to have. A "scientific mind" (damn, I'm abusing quotes) starts with a gathering of random but interesting knowledge (as you call, trivia), from that point you start infering and dealing with patterns and such to develop critic thinking.
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
Science spur from the need of understanding the natural world around us, and that came after knowing some silly facts and asking yourself: "Why is that so?".
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
If you've seen any episode of Jay Leno's Jaywalking, you wouldn't be surprised that so few Americans are knowledgeable about a particular topic. Politics, science, history, current news events, etc. The fact of the matter is that most people just don't care. People are concerned about themselves first, things that directly affect them, second, and everything else a distant third.
I'd be that if the answer to the question "How long does it take the Earth to go around the Sun?" was the more correct one of 365.25, the correct percentage of responses would be much lower than 50%.
I wonder what percentage of people have no idea why we have Leap Years?
But everyone knows that the British are prone to over-generalisation.
That's a false dichotomy. Merit pay is not the only solution to our science education troubles and presenting it as that is not necessarily a good way to go about it. However, merit pay may be the best solution given the situation.
I'm not sure how we can fix the education system at a national level when school boards or states control curriculum at the local level, because some of those are well funded and well run and will be good and some are poorly funded and/or poorly run and will be bad. You can mandate that a state's schools teach something or have a certain level of proficiency in something, or else lose federal money (like highway money), but I'm not entirely sure even that will work. E.g., when the "No child left behind" forced schools to have certain standards, the schools just taught what would be on the exams and nothing else, along with woefully inadequate funding and no positive incentives for teaching better, only negative ones. I personally don't think you can fix this without a national set of standards, curriculum and organizational structure for public education, but increasing the federal government's role in anything releases a huge amount of political protest by the "conservatives" who will protest if the federal government does anything that isn't on the "conservative" agenda.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
If you asked a scientist who works on calibrating the leap seconds added to UTC to make up for irregularities in the rotation of the earth he might well answer "we don't know exactly".
If you take a scientific basis that times should be measured in basic defined units (SI second) then saying "it takes a year" is roughly equivalent of saying "it takes as long as it takes".
You very often find that what might seem to be a trivial question to someone with basic high-school science is actually difficult to give a clear-cut answer to.
It's like "stony" or "woody" but a lot better to make swords out of?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
PI? Yes, I want a piece. Blueberry is superb
PI ~= 3 , 1 4 1 5 9 2 6
No need to memorize any digits. Memorize a story.
Same goes for bank card pin numbers. Don't memorize the number. Type the number out on a keypad, and memorize the hand motion. It's tons easier. If you need to, make a little story. Not any of my pins, but 6841 could be "fish jumps out of the water, and then swims straight to the bottom."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...and maybe schoolboards.... Of course these people probably suck at math too, so those stats give them no idea how deep in the guano we are. :/
According to The Register, 71% of the earth's surface is covered by water... which was regarded as an incorrect answer in the survey! Apparently pollsters and journalists aren't too big on science knowledge either. (We were taught in school that 3/4 of the earth's surface was covered in water.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
FTA
The approximately correct answer range for this question was defined as anything between 65% and 75%. Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%.
I'm sorry, no. Seventy percent is not "exactly correct". At best it is an estimate, and one that is subject to natural fluctuations due to things like temperatures, tidal patterns, etc.
How much should a layperson actually know about the planet's water coverage? "More than half water" is probably a little lacking; "between two-thirds and three-quarters" is probably about right.
"Between 70% and 71%" is worthless nitpicking, a rote recitation of a rule of thumb learned in grade school, the same place they learned that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, there are 2,000 pounds in a ton, and 1 yard = 1 meter.
When we need legal advice, we hire legal experts. When we need our car repaired, we hire a mechanic (most of the time). We are a society of specialists. Thus, why should we expect that everyone remember science info 20+ years after school? I agree it's helpful for making political decisions, but so is legal knowledge. Why treat one more special than the other?
Don't get me wrong, I like science and find most of it interesting, but others may not care so much and brains tend to have a use-it-or-loose-it "garbage collection" algorithm.
Thus, what exactly are we asking of the population and how realistic is this request? I sense a case of "Everything's Important" syndrome going on here.
Table-ized A.I.
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge.
I hate it when people mistake factoids for science.
I hate it when people mistake popular blurbs for reason.
Maybe. But not knowing that the earth takes one year to revolve around the sun indicates a pretty serious failure to know what the fuck is going on.
And, seriously...if you can't imagine a globe in your head and at least get between 60% and 80% water...you are pretty ignorant. If a lot of people are that ignorant, we have a problem.
As always, I would like to see results of the exact same survey from other countries for comparison.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Is it just me, or don't we still pal around with dinosaurs? Hell, I even hunt the things in an event called a spring turkey hunt.
But understanding of basic, basic facts is critical to using science. These ideas allow you to discard scores of hypothesis as silly before you waste time testing them.
Science aims at producing those "factoids". Aren't the products of scientific research what non-scientists want from scientists?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
But isn't science ultimately used to produce facts? Such as the percentage of water covering our planets surface?
I am the lawn!
The education system is borked and everyone knows it. Lets go back to an apprentice/master system.
I generally agree. However, there needs to be some level of assumed working knowledge (i.e., trivia) before one can start designing experiments, start doing research and evaluate competency.
It takes most graduate students at least a year or two before they can obtain the level of sophistication you enumerated; they start off collecting factoids by reading papers and learning from their lab mates. Once they have enough confidence in themselves and their area, they move on to do actual science.
I'm not sure how you would expect the general public to develop to this level of skill when the closest they come to scientific literature is a maybe a pop-science article in Time Magazine or an three-year-old Scientific American in their doctor's office.
This is news? It's been true for about 6000 years.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...just over 50% of Americans believe so-called global warming is a problem.
The 47% that got things right falls nicely with the 41% who have figured out that global warming is a scam.
Hopefully as Americans get more educated, they'll recognize another financial scam when they see one.
Kevin
"I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and that I believe our education like such as South Africa and the Iraq, and everywhere, such as, and I believe that they should our education over here in the US, should help the US, or should help South Africa and help the Iraq and the Asian countries so that we will be able to build out our future for us."
Okay, so it's not science, but our schools really aren't helping matters. (Quote comes from here if anyone missed it or is unfamiliar with the event)
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge. [..]
Scientific literacy would be understanding (1) how to research science you need (2) how to conduct a proper experiment[..]
While this is obviously not a scientific statement, I would, however, guess that the correlation between someone knowing those facts and the same person being scientifically literate is rather strong. So, measuring scientific literacy by a quick survey like this is both faster and cheaper than a more elaborate test while still giving you reasonably accurate results.
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge.
Incorrect. "Trivia", by definition, is useless information, such as who won American Idol last season. Knowing that 70% of the earth is covered with water is essential information for realizing that overpopulation is an issue, for knowing how crucial water currents are with relation to global warming and weather phenomena, and for geographical and political-boundary wisdom. It's nearly as essential as knowing the shape of the planet or where the meridians and parallels are--the lack of this info is, in certain ways, crippling.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Merit pay for "student achievement" is a bad idea. Not because I'm some kind of communist, but because I'm one of the (it seems) relatively few people that actually think about what student achievement in science education looks like.
Knowing random facts about stuff is only a side-effect of actually being scientifically literate. The idea of scientific literacy includes knowing the core concepts of science, being able to construct (and deconstruct) scientific arguments, being able to use the tools of science, and being able to participate in the broader scientific community. Knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered in water isn't really part of that puzzle AT ALL. (I'm a relatively "literate" person, with a BS, MS, and PhD, although not in earth science, and I thought it was closer to 60%).
Science education is of supreme importance to the future. But if you're really serious about improving science education, you have to think HARD about what you mean by that. You mean: making sure people have all the pieces of scientific literacy, not just making students memorize facts.
Once you accept that point (and clearly, slashdot comment threads are not the places for real debate, but try reading How People Learn (bransford and brown) and Taking Science to School (big committee, but published by the NAP) for more insight there).... where was I? Oh yes, if you accept that scientific literacy is more than just knowing facts, you have to take a critical look at the standardized tests you're using to base teacher merit pay on. They don't actually test scientific literacy. They test fact retention for the most part, and scientific process skills to a lesser extent. But process skills in these things are tested in a content-free way that completely lacks any kind of face validity as to its relationship to actual scientific inquiry practices.
So, think about it: we're going to base teacher merit pay on student performance. Fine. But if you want to do that RIGHT, you have to actually measure the kind of performance you want, rather than settle for the kind of performance that's easily testable on a large scale. That turns out to be a nigh-intractable problem, and it's this intellectual cutting of corners (testing what you can test, and valuing that, instead of valuing what's central to each discipline and accepting that testing for performance in that fashion is going to be expensive and a real challenge) that's led to the travesty of NCLB - nationwide failure of a system that's supposed to help our most fragile natural resource.
Anyway. The biggest problem with all of this is that thinking hard about education is a real challenge. Teachers have a very important set of critical skills that most science folks don't understand (since most science folks tend to think that science should be just as easy to everybody else as it was to them). Sure, there are plenty of bad teachers. But basing merit pay on test performance will do very little to improve education if the tests are deeply flawed.
The OP is really a conglomeration of several problems that should be addressed separately:
Here's what the concerns seem to come to: Finding the value of science in society (point #1); Determining whether certain science facts are absolutely essential for every person to know (i.e., points #3 and 4); Making it a societal value for people to spread science in school systems (#2 and 5).
Why are we trying to promote science to the general public, when the general public doesn't know how it's useful in everyday life?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
Really?
Cool!
What?
How many technology workers have a land line in this day and age?
This suffers from the same problems as political telephone surveys:
1) Is the person home
2) Will the person answer the phone
3) Is the person willing to take the survey
Most of us have better things to do, those who don't are often just couch-potatoes or other unmotivated people.
To the best of my knowledge they don't call cell phones, so most of the tech-savvy people are not even candidates. They don't call business lines, so people who are working late are not candidates either(assuming they don't call during the day which would further eliminate those with day-jobs)
Think of all the people you know with a land line. Are those generally the smartest people you know? The most tech-savvy?
Sounds to me that it is almost more of a survey of jobless luddites than the average hard working American citizen...
To Quote the article:
"...and over 40% think dinosaurs and humans cavorted together like in some sort of 'Land Of The Lost' episode."
If you believe the Bible, which I do, you can see that in Job chapter 40 verses 15 to 24, a possible dinosaur that Job called the behemoth walked with Man and was able to describe what it looked like. Also, in Job 41, the entire Chapter Job talks about the Leviathan. Just a heads up.
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
You need to a finite verb to that sentence.
At the bottom of the
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that people who fail such a test are able to apply the scientific method. It is probable that people who pass this test, still have no real understanding of the scientific method, how to apply it, or why it works.
I surmise that thinking such as is demonstrated in this survey is a symptom of our broken educational system. It is highly focused upon rote memorization instead of applicable skills and understanding concepts. It's easier to memorize the definition of science than to understand the method. It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand. It's significantly easier to test memorization than understanding. It is vastly easier to standardize a test for memorizing a blurb than for understanding a concept.
Don't get me wrong. I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats and likely theories. I just think that should come second to a thorough understanding of the scientific method and how to apply it to determine the truth as well as a firm grounding in hands on experimentation so students can learn that it does work and have confidence in it.
what a shame you don't read the fucking moderator instructions before you downmod people who you don't agree with.
As an ex-biology teacher, one of my professor's pet peeves was that there was no single "scientific method". There are a some general approaches and a lot of techniques, but no single, official approach.
For example, it may be that doing double-blind studies are often a great idea, but we regularly accept studies without it as being scientifically valid. I'm actually partial to the "guess and check" method for solving lots of problems. Different problems work better with different methods.
The questions didn't test understanding. They tested memorization.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"To forget it!"
"You see," he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet
The "I" is, of course Dr. Watson, and the "He" is of course Sherlock Holmes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Government or private, I see the fact that the teachers assign the grades as a major problem.
The grades are supposed to be a measure of the student's success at learning the material, which is implicitly seen as a measure of the teacher's success at teaching it. So, when teachers are under pressure to get grades up, they can just grade more easily. The grades go up, the teachers look good, and stupider students get sent into the world.
In my opinion, there should be separate testing and teaching bodies (as is the case with law school). The domain-specific intelligence tests should be regulated either by the government or by some neutral standards body (I am not saying that will be easy). That way the teachers only options are to teach better or to get rid of the students that refuse to learn (both desirable, IMO), and schools can compete against one another based on their success at preparing students to get good grades on these tests.
what a shame you don't read the fucking moderator instructions before you downmod people who you don't agree with.
Except for the first, I was modding all the "correlation is not causation" posts "redundant". It's boring, if all the replies to an article are the same.
I agree but most people know the sun goes around the earth, each day in fact!
Why is this marked as flamebait? How else do you explain Americans swallowing books like "The DaVinci Code" and "An Inconvenient Truth" as scientific fact? The fact is that these authors both realize that the American public is largely illiterate in every subject, so they craft a work of fiction and pass it off as fact to this audience rather than publishing their findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."
The Earth goes around the what now?
Small though it is, the human brain can be quite effective when used properly.
So if say 50% of the earth were covered with water it would mean overpopulation isn't an issue, global warming wouldn't be affected by water currents, etc?
I don't think knowing the percentage is all that important to non-scientists' understanding of critical scientific issues.
Mod parent up!
This article does indeed highlight a disturbing lack of scientific literacy, but only by demonstrating how poorly even the authors understand science. Science is a method, not a collection of facts, and while the first question (about the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun) might qualify as a real question of understanding, the other two are just factoids.
The core of scientific literacy is having the set of skills listed above, and a mindset that insists on applying these skills to every situation you encounter. Anything short of that is, at best, bad science, and more often than not, mere metaphysics.
If someone fulfills the five criteria the GP gave, then they would know that ID isn't science.
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific. As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question. And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize. Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
ok let's start with simpler things.
How many states are there?
How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
How many stripes and stars are on the USA flag?
Name 3 countries in europe.
Name 3 countries in Asia.
Name 3 countries in south america.
Name 3 countries in north america.
Explain how you can calculate your approximate destination time from your speed and distance.
Guess What. a HUGE portion of Americans will FAIL the above basic test. Many MBA holders and other COLLEGE DEGREE HOLDING people will fail it.
Dont get me started on basic science that you can use daily, math, driving safety, common sense, etc... if you add those in then the numbers that fail rise drastically.
Critical thinking skills? you are asking the morons that travel at 85mpg 6 feet from the guy in front of him to think critically when they cant comprehend that their actions daily on the highway are incredibly stupid? How about being able to do basic math so you understand that the 15% you will save opening that store credit card to buy that item will cost you 30% more even if you go home and pay it off right now due to dropping your credit score like a stone.
Most dont know who their representatives are in local and state government or how to get a hold of them. You need to get off your pedestal and actually spend a week observing people and the incredibly uneducated things they do. It's not out of habit or malice, these people around you really are that uneducated.
I see this amplified from the Exchange students at my daughters school.. The German kids all mention how american school is insanely easy compared to theirs. friends I have in Germany, Italy, and China all also cant understand why Americans cant speak more than 1 language and dont understand what they consider basic math, Algebra and Geometry, Most Americans do not know.
Our schools have been an utter failure for decades. From the public kindergarten all the way up to Post graduate. colleges skew grades so that you get a C for what used to be failing the class. now our "average" students are the faiure uneducated ones.
honestly, I wish Obama had the balls to call out and demand that all truancy laws be reinstated, teachers paid based on merit, and that schools and colleges be forced to stop passing people that should not be.
3 of the highschools around here will give you a diploma even if you cant read. That is not shocking, it's a disgusting embarassment.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Being the close friend of two teachers, I can attest to the fact that the teachers are there eager to teach, it's the apathetic attitude of parents and students that's the problem. I can't believe how many times they get irate parents upset that the teacher gave their kid an F for handing in a blank test. Kids aren't allowed to fail these days.
Add to that, lack of funding for cool things like science fairs and robot building competitions etc and you're obviously not turning out kids with a good general eduction let alone science education.
I would, as number (0) understanding what is and what isn't science.
Obvious example: "intelligent design"
That's more difficult than most people think. Karl Popper recognised that the boundary between metaphysics and science can only ever be a convention (in his introduction to the 2nd edition of "The Logic of Science"). "Falsifiability" only works as an abstract concept; it doesn't actually reflect how science really works in practice or what counts as science in practice. That means that although there's stuff that is decidedly within science (eg, heliocentric solar system) and stuff that is decidedly outside science (eg, ID), there's a huge fuzzy area that may or not be science depending on the definitions you take. There's a discussion here about this problem in the context of evolution. (For those who can't be bothered clicking links -- this is /. after all -- it concludes that evolution is science, because science isn't all about falsifiability).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences.
You can't learn how to critically deduce something if you don't know things. A basic example, using something un-scientific, jigsaw puzzle solving. See, I know a basic fact, "the box contains 5000 pieces", I know another basic fact "borders are flat in at least one of the sides". With those in mind you can start creating a process to solve the jigsaw, you can put on that a few more "unit" data: "it is easier to get 1 pair together than 4", and from that place start deriving how you are going to solve it. Ok, it is a silly example, and not that great of an analogy (I'm at work and tired), but it shows that without any of those basic facts I couldn't work on how to solve the problem.
Mind you, I think "critical thought", "Principals of Western Philosophy", "Mathematical proofs", "Basic Algorithms" should all be classes since the 5th grade (10 years old here in Brazil). You need to teach the kids how to think. But you need to show them some fact too, so they can apply what they are learning in terms of thinking, and their curiosity on a bunch of "silly" trivia and from that onwards learn how to think.
It is unlikely, but not impossible, that people who fail such a test are able to apply the scientific method. It is probable that people who pass this test, still have no real understanding of the scientific method, how to apply it, or why it works.
I agree with you that people who pass this test may still have no understading of the scientific method, but I don't think that someone who can't get those facts can know it. Mainly because they are easy to infer from other things. Take the question about how much water there is in the world. I may not know the number, I may not have ever thought about it, but if I saw a map, and thinking a bit about it, I can make a good guess (which means, we should expect a much higher "close enough" percentage). The fact that so many people have no idea about it, shows not just a lack of trivia knowledge but a lack of deducing capabilities.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
considering the amount of Americans believing in creationism.
There are some appealing arguments for it.
There are some appealing arguments against it.
Which makes me wonder:
HAS ANYBODY THOUGHT TO LOOK WHETHER THERE IS FOREIGN RESEARCH THAT INDICATES AN ANSWER ONE WAY OR ANOTHER?
Sheesh. What a Rorschach test to expose opinions.
see El reg
Ha ha. This is funny as shit, but Insightful?
I could only bring myself to watch until about 1/6 of the video because of the dishonest way it goes about things and the apple-pear comparisons that haven't been justified. Not to mention the strawmen (yes, I did in fact know, thank you very much, don't imply I didn't) and the cherry picking. As such, it isn't a documentary, it's a propaganda movie. For what, I'm not exactly sure because I can't be arsed to finish it, I've got a low tolerance for propaganda and I should watch my bpm. ;-)
... when the creationism crowd will let the religious leaders do your science thinking for you.
it has nothing to do with that, if you even bring up God in a public school your toast.
The simple fact is, kids test higher at 4th grade than high school because the system isn't designed around students but instead designed around tax dollars.
This has nothing to do with God, it is all about money and power. Guess who has it, not the parents. Hell too many of them willfully forgo it and wonder why junior is dumber than a box of rocks.
sorry, but the stupid cheap "slashdot correct" response isn't even close to factual. If anything those attending religious schools are doing far better... how do you explain that?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Teacher's Unions don't have issues with merit pay per se, they have issues with determining merit, and the fact that every time it gets put forward it's really a disguised pay cut.
"Yet, when the secular progressives run everything literacy is now less than it was when GOD was actually in the classrooms."
God had to graduate sometime.
63.413% of all statistics are meaningless!
Scientific literacy would be understanding ... etc.
Which, here (Germany) and in my days, was (roughly) the equivalent of the qualifications you should have assembled for a doctor's degree (except perhaps for the realm of medicine).
Go figure. (This is not to indicate that I do not agree, my suspicion is that these days only a fraction of those brand new quick shot "doctores" is 'scientifically literate' as you describe.)
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I learned around the age of five, in Kindergarten, that the oceans cover roughly two thirds of the Earth's surface, and certainly more than half.
For reference, Wikipedia:
Who wrote this article? Quayle, is that you? Come on, spell "potatoe" for us! :P
Wait a minute - the Earth goes round the Sun ? Since when ? Tell me that again at sunrise tomorrow so I can have a good laugh.
Anyone have the link to the quiz?
--
So who it hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Education is the responsibility of states. This is another instance of federal government overstepping its bounds. ("Bounds" here is used in the constitutional sense, not in the "a word used to describe any visible or demonstrable effects" sense)
Okay my science sense was tingling the first time I read this article so I googled the "percentage of the earth that is water". I got some really interesting results. Scientists don't know for sure how much of the earth is covered in water. I would hazard to say it also changes from year to year. The largest value I found was 80 percent coverage. The lowest value I found was 69.8. Now I know this isn't accurate at all. I am trying to make a point. The average out of all values I found was about 70%. This means the uncertainty in the measured value is about 10%. How could you argue people getting a value wrong when there is no consensus among scientists in the first place.
Fine. In that case, it's my OPINION that you're a moron when it comes to science, rather than a FACT that you don't have a clue.
BTW - it IS a question of science, not opinion.
Time to add "intelligent design" to the list of oxymorons, and tattoo "I'm superstitious" on the forehead of anyone who believes in it.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
This is incorrect. We have no evidence that they lived together. Individuals may choose to ignore the _scientific_ facts, but that isn't science. So, #fail! By your reasoning, if someone was asked: "Is the world round or flat?" and they answered "flat" based on whatever whacko system of beliefs they might have, it suddenly becomes a question of "opinion"? Certainly not. Why an individual chooses to ignore certain areas of scientific understanding are irrelevant, unless it's done on a scientific basis.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Einstein, Pauli & Von Braun.
They should have asked in the survey who they were. Over half would probably say it's a firm of attorneys.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are topics the Slashdot community is good at handling. And there are topics that Slashdot simply doesn't gain any traction on. This is obviously one of the latter.
The real issue is that the survey in question is insipid. It is unsurprising that when the political climate is such that some position needs to be justified that surveys and articles and opinion pieces will appear in the press supporting one side or another of the issue. The President (rightly or wrongly) appears to want to pursue a new strategy for funding education. Therefore PR is needed to raise the priority of this issue relative to the vast numbers of other critically important issues.
The semiotics of the survey are to say 1) science is important, and 2) we suck at teaching science.
If there were some scientific reason to study the public's knowledge of basic oceanographic facts, an appropriate question for narrowing in on our grasp of the fact that the Earth is about twice as much covered by the oceans as by the continents would likely have broader bins. Or perhaps it would ask for a sliding scale and then bin the data after the fact. I'm personally rather impressed that almost half the sample would have been within +/- 5 percentage points (not "percent") of the "right" answer.
...which begs the question of how the right answer is defined. Are we talking salt water or liquid of any type? What about the ice caps - ain't they water? Water to what depth? Seasonal variations? Variations with climate change?
Those who are concerned about science education can actually do something about it rather than kvetch about teachers. Schools are often willing to work with parents and community members to provide resources they can't afford in their budget. Schools have extracurricular programs like Science Olympiad (and many others) that are usually staffed by volunteers. Universities and labs often partner with local schools. A few hundred volunteers will be judging our regional science fair this Tuesday. You don't even need to do it "for the kids" - they'll feed you breakfast and lunch paid for by TI or a utility company - and personally, my take on the state of the world is always bettered by the experience.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but why precisely do we think everybody needs to be flogged into math and science (even if such could possibly succeed)? There are also language fairs, art fairs, dance and music and theater - and auto shop and carpentry and... One of my best experiences in a rather dreadful HS career was print shop - the technologies have all changed, but the diversity of niches still remain. We used to have neighbors - she was a PhD in the University French department. He was a (successful) baker from Switzerland with no college education.
Take the solution into your own hands.
The problem with the US education system is that it is built and run like a pyramid scheme, with administrators at the top and teachers at the bottom. Instead of firing bad teachers or giving good teachers merit raises, we should be stream lining the layers of administration and replacing them with more teachers and teachers aides.
It would be nice to know what percentage of teachers fail the basic science poll before deciding to hand out merit raises.
Right, because forcing delinquents into classrooms is so good for everyone's learning, and student performance on federal standardized tests is such a good indicator of who's a good teacher.
I'm all for intervening when kids aren't showing up at school, and for rewarding good teachers. But neither of these can be accomplished with the simplistic ideas behind current truancy laws or merit pay schemes.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This was a bad test in general, and appears designed to get this desired result. Out of the three questions on the test, one offered overly narrow chances for success, and the other touches on a well known socio-political hot topic. I think the water coverage question was a poor test example. Realistically it's only important to realize that the answer is > 50%. I also think that the dinosaurs coexisting with humans question is also a poor example since it jives with Creationism, a well known headache point for all parties involved. The US population is heavily conflicted with what their Church tells them, and as such people will state things as true whether or not they really believe it if it is wrapped up in Church doctrine. The results about how long the earth takes to orbit the sun are a bit disturbing though.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
*does double take* Opinion question? Whether humans (who have been around for less than a million years no matter how loosely you define human) and dinosaurs (which have been dead for over 60 million years unless you call crocodiles and/or birds dinosaurs) lived together is opinion? What definition of opinion are you using?
Claiming religious belief is absurd. If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
And no, this is no strawman. The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart and clearly established, that the only way to have them live together would be if we had a deity who interceded in direct physical ways constantly. And if you accept that, then the scientific method is just as worthless as if you regularly deny the visual evidence of 6 billion people the world over when it comes to the color of the grass and the sky.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Trivia or not, it doesn't change the fact that is "basic scientific information". Or at least, basic knowledge of the world that is useful, or at least interesting, to have.
But that's the point, it's not useful information to have. In no way is knowing how much of the earth is covered in water useful for the average American.
What's useful stuff like "is it going to rain tomorrow", "are my taxes going to go up", "will I have a job next week", "do these jean make my ass look fat".
My 13-year old nephew was told by his science teacher that the c in E=mc2 is...wait for it..."solar energy". *facepalm* And these are the same people that regurgitate Al Gore's preaching.
If you don't think a teacher can inspire students, you've never had a good teacher, let alone a great one.
I have had several inspiring teachers, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that their talent and dedication was not motivated by pay. Teachers need better pay--not to inspire them, but so that more people who would be good teachers can reasonably contemplate doing so.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It's not that they did not know it, or could not work it out, it is that they snapped back an answer of "24 hours" because they thought that the question was something that it wasn't.
Nullius in verba
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific.
I don't think that's the problem. It's just that it only asks about facts/likely truths determined by science, not about science itself.
As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question.
Agreed.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science.
Well, it is asking a question where the scientific method has determined one answer to be the most likely truth. Science never really proves anything, just has theories that are more or less supported. A person who understands and trusts the scientific method is a person who accepts the most supported theory until the preponderance of evidence shifts.
It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
It's also entirely possible for someone to understand the science but believe for religious reasons that the earth does not go around the sun. It's just not rational or scientific because it is rejecting the answers presented by the scientific method and arbitrarily believing something else.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize.
I agree it should not be about trivia, but it should include understanding and applying the scientific method. If people apply the scientific method very narrowly and then apply irrational and nonscientific methods to determine the facts about other parts of the world, then I'd argue scientific literacy has failed to a significant extent.
Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
No, but to be literate means you can read and often that you do read, not that you can read certain things but in other instances you can just look at the pictures or you make up what you think the little squiggly things on the paper mean. You don't have to agree with Orwell to be literate, you just have to be able to read his books. Not understanding that the scientific method has determined the most likely truth to be that humans and dinosaurs never inhabited the earth at the same time is analogous to being unable to read Orwell.
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge.
No. Failing to name the exact or +/- 10% fraction of Earth that is covered in water most emphatically does NOT demonstrate a disregard for scientific knowledge.
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One Morlock's problem is another Morlock's food supply.
..how much of the planet's total liquid water is available for drinking and farming, i.e., is fresh and clean enough?
My wife is a science teacher. She left a job recovering organs and tissues etc. for transplant to become a science teacher because it afforded her more time with the kids.
In her years of teaching she has noticed a few prevalent problems that cause problems with science education, her and I have discussed these at great length.
1. There is a shortage of science teachers. It is always hardest for the the schools to recruit science and math teachers.
2. Due to the fact that the science and math teachers are generally smarter, more logical, and better organized than their 'Bachelor of Arts' counter-parts they are usually the first to be promoted into quasi-management positions (Asst. Principal, Principal etc.)
3. Most of these promotees quickly become disenfranchised with the bureaucracy and idiocy that runs rampant through American schools. They end up getting very frustrated, and instead of resigning from the quasi-management job and going back to being a teacher, their frustration with the 'whole system' causes them to quit outright and seek their fortunes elsewhere.
The future of science education in America is bleak my friends (and foes.)
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
While your view is technically correct, knowing how to experiment is far less useful than knowing the accumulated knowledge from experiments already completed in the past. If everyone had to experiment to verify the existence of germs or gravity, we'd get no further in scientific knowledge than what can be learned from scratch in a person's lifetime. It's more important to know that hotter air rises over cold air as information to utilize in daily life. Of course, if you're researching new science, then it's a different ballgame, but then this article isn't talking about you. There is too much accumulated knowledge to be able to test everything that's already been tested by others and this is witnessed by people that take medicine that a doctor tells them has already been tested by others, instead of having everyone use scientific theory to validate that a medicine will work on them by testing it on their pet dog. There comes a time when you have to trust your society or government to have done the scientific research and just tell you the result instead of everyone having to do it.
How long the earth takes to revolve around the sun? Everyone knows God made the Sun revolve around the Earth! The Earth is the center of the Universe. Everything revolves around the Earth. People are so dumb. /sarcasm
So I took the "Science Literacy Test"
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/SciLit.html
A T/F test, including questions like:
Science has one uniform way of conducting research called "the scientific method."
This turns out to be "false" (according to the Author of the test) because when you study different things (say Microbiology and History), you have to use different methods.
Well DUH! Of course you do. But that doesn't mean that you don't form theories and test your theories. You do that with historical research as well, even if you can't culture the Ottoman Empire!
Obviously there are people out there that think the Scientific Method actually refers to a literal method every scientist follows, checking off each step of The Method. Those of us that actually do research understand there is no such thing, but we all believe we use the Scientific Method.
So BLAH!
I haven't that much faith in a test intended to test my understanding of Science when the Author doesn't know how to avoid subjective wording in their questions.
Mandatory Philosophy of Science classes, especially for scientist.
Amazing the number of PhD bobble heads running around Universities that could not distinguish basic things like how the world OUGHT to be (domain of philosophy), from how the world IS (domain of science). Granted, most can likly do some sort of science, but even in professional publications will turn an OUGHT in to an IS in making assertions about the World. The next bobble head will then use that as basis of some other assertion, and off we go to in to scientific fantasy land that seems to get picked up by the media as scientific fact more and more.
We then wonder why the average Joe the plumber, or Suzy the student can not engage in simple scientific activities and reasoning, as Tim the teacher had gibberish in his teaching text book to start.
Living in Chile
I differ with you on your definition of 'literacy'. Literacy is being able to read and write effectively (in a field). By extention it means generally being knowledgeable in a field. A large part of literacy in any techincal field is going to include knowing basic trivia. (Is someone computer literate who doesn't know what RAM or OS stands for or how big a KB is?)
Knowing how much of the earth is covered in water may not be the best possible question to determine this, but your list of how-to critera (while perhaps a list of skills more important that scientific literacy) is IMHO off mark.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
I don't understand the concentration on teachers as being a group that would be improved by merit pay. Many if not most professions have no merit pay, or only a modest token:
The "problem" is not so much that we don't want to pay for excellence as that we're very unwilling to not pay for poor performance. In my 20+ year career, I have never seen someone fired for not doing their job adequately. When I see a CEO that runs his company over a cliff standing on the corner begging for nickels, I'll know we've made some progress. Until then, we need to support our teachers rather than using them as an ideological punching bag.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
FTA "Only 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%." Really? 70% is exactly correct? It's not something like 70.4?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
I was invited to judge a middle-school science fair a few years back.
The displays ranged from very fancy and very obviously put together by the student's parents to slapped-together-at-the-last-minute-because-its-due-tomorrow.
At every display I stopped at I asked the student what question his question was, what was his expected answer, how he tested for the answer, and if his results proved or disproved his expected answer.
At the fancy displays I got looks of incomprehension - a couple of students sort of understood what they were doing, but for most their parents had designed their displays and probably provided the result data sets too. All they were concerned about was impressing the judges with style, not substance. Most of these students received few if any points from me.
One display, however caught my eye. Everything had been drawn by hand, and like me, his penmanship wasn't very good. But his question was different from the stock "What kind of light do plants prefer?" that had been extracted from "101 Science Fair Projects" book bought by the parents. This student's question was "Does the octane level of automobile fuel affect mileage?" The student's hypothesis was the higher the octane rating, the better the mileage.
I asked him how he tested his hypothesis and he told me he asked his father to fill up the family car with regular, mid-grade, and super-premium gas and record the odometer reading at every fill-up. He made sure each tank of gas tested was used under normal conditions (no long highway trips for example), did the math, and came up with the result that octane level did not noticeably affect the car's mileage for better or worse.
I gave that kid full points, even though his display was pretty drab, his question not very sexy, and his presentation not very polished. He understood what the scientific method was and how to apply it.
Of course, it was the pretty girl with the toy rocket experiment and the semi-professional display that won. And she couldn't answer the most basic questions about her experiment.
What?
Knowing that 70% of the earth is covered with water is essential information for realizing that overpopulation is an issue
Actually you exemplify the problem. Issues like overpopulation aren't "known" at all.
This is why critical thinking trumps "knowing" crap. People who know things also know the wrong things.
I am currently in college going after a MS in Physics. I plan to take a few years out and teach high school physics, because the high school I went to didn't offer it, cause they had no one to teach the class (this is what I am guessing since they didn't offer it). The math classes where a joke and they didn't even offer Pre-Calc.
So I hope that maybe I can take those years an inspire someone to take up physics or math.
I also see it as something that someone with a science or math degree should do. At the very least take a moment of your life and teach the younger generations. Maybe then we won't have some of the problems that we are facing today.
You can't learn how to critically deduce something if you don't know things... [you go on to present an example of a jigsaw puzzle]
True, but you don't have to know any specific things. For example, you can apply the scientific method to solving jigsaw puzzles without knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered with water. For any given problem you need to acquire facts and create a hypothesis and an experiment in order to apply the scientific method. Having more facts can make your hypothesis more likely to be a good one. You don't, however, actually need particular facts going into the process, which is why in "Science" classes the method should be the priority and the facts less so.
I don't actually think we're too far apart on this, conceptually.
Mind you, I think "critical thought", "Principals of Western Philosophy", "Mathematical proofs", "Basic Algorithms" should all be classes since the 5th grade (10 years old here in Brazil).
I think those are a good start, although they might be a bit biased towards one end of the spectrum. I'd like to see something a little more rounded including foundations of logic and the rhetorical method. A lot of people understand reason, but fail in conveying it and understanding discussions because they don't understand how to converse well and reasonably.
But you need to show them some fact too, so they can apply what they are learning in terms of thinking, and their curiosity on a bunch of "silly" trivia and from that onwards learn how to think.
Oh I'm all in favor of teaching facts. I wrote, "I think science classes should run through teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats[sic] and likely theories," in my previous post.
I agree with you that people who pass this test may still have no understading of the scientific method, but I don't think that someone who can't get those facts can know it. Mainly because they are easy to infer from other things.
Ahh, but that's not what I wrote. I wrote that it is possible they may not know those particular facts when surveyed. That's not at all the same thing as not being able to get those facts. While you can infer some of those facts from other facts, you need to know those other facts first. Just because someone has never seen a map of the earth does not mean they can't know the scientific method.
The fact that so many people have no idea about it, shows not just a lack of trivia knowledge but a lack of deducing capabilities.
In all likelihood it is a combination of things. Most people who don't know these facts, likely don't know the scientific method either, but it is not actually a good test for if people are scientifically literate. It really is too bad education is not a bigger priority. It can be so much more than it is.
Here's the run down for Pasco:
Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense... It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun.
That is a false choice. Other options include (a) more rigorous standards, (b) more willingness for teachers to fail students and fight grade-inflation, (c) lessening students' consumerist expectations that they are paying for grades, etc. I believe that I'm consistently the highest-rated teacher where I teach. Yet I would not want merit pay to be implemented.
Here's what the Urban Institute found in a statistical study:
A study by the Urban Institute found some positive short-lived effects of merit pay, but concluded that most merit pay plans "did not succeed at implementing lasting, effective ... plans that had a demonstrated ability to improve student learning." Problems included low teacher morale because of increased competition between teachers, as well as wasted time and money in the administration of the merit pay plans. The same study found "little evidence from other research...that incentive programs (particularly pay-for-performance) had led to improved teacher performance and student achievements.
Here's what the Libertarian Cato Institute says:
Marie Gryphon, an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, makes some practical objections:
- The system can't simply reward high scores. If it did, it would favor teachers in wealthy neighborhoods whose students came to school with excellent skills. Nor can the system reward only improvement. If it did, it would unfairly penalize teachers whose students were already scoring too well to post large gains.
- Moreover, any money for test results scheme will worsen the problem of teachers cheating on standardized tests to avoid the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers willing to erase wrong answers on exams to avoid having their school labeled "needing improvement" will also be tempted by the thought of a personal raise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_pay#Other_opposition
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
We should at least teach our young how to distinguish between science and faith, even if they can't see the difference between knowledge and memorized data.
teaching a wide base of scientifically determined fats
They're big-boned, and quit talking about their wide backsides.
Oh, wait, you were describing the curriculum, not the student body.
I am officially gone from
The typical public school teacher is very good indeed. The problem is not in the teachers or in their work.
What is really going on is a crippled school system brought about by parental demands.
You can't flunk Johnny. You can't control Johnny. You can't suspend Johnny. You dare not hold him back a year. The ALMIGHTY Parent demands that the lessons be so completely dumbed down that even if Johnny has been blowing pot and snorting coke for a week he can still make straight A grades.
Gone is the notion that hard work is involved in learning. The idea that learning is almost like running in an Olympic race where one has to give one's all and try without error or exception to succeed has been castrated from the educational model.
The certain knowledge that those who do poorly in school will almost always suffer poverty and deep social rejection can not be mentioned or else.
The idea of an honor code where one is obliged to report others for cheating sounds wrong to the modern ear. Instead parents prefer their children to gang bang, take dope and kill each other. They must prefer it as they do almost everything to cause it.
The education system of our grandparents and great-grandparents (and to a considerable, but still lesser, extent the education systems of a number of European and Asian countries [many of which outperform the US]) was based on rote memorization.
Abraham Lincoln with some regularity gave hour+ long speeches entirely from memory. Nowadays knowing all 4 stanzas of The Star-Spangled Banner would probably be considered impressive by most.
The curious fact is that the less we focus on *hard* rote memorization, the worse the average person's brain seems to deal with most everything else as well.
And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
No, it is not possible to understand science and believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Those two things are mutually exclusive, and it's time we start standing up and point that out. To believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted one would either have to discount all geological understanding or just not get it. One cannot understand sediment and fossilization and then believe that all the evidence is false.
Furthermore, I'd argue, it's not possible to understand evolution and not believe in it. The theory is so basic and so obviously true that even the vaguest understanding of how it works makes it essentially impossible to reject.
I will accept that one can understand scientific theory and method and still believe in God (because they choose not to apply it to metaphysics), and I think that's fine. But one can no more hold on to the "opinion" that humans and dinosaurs coexisted than one can hold on to the "opinion" that the earth is flat while still understanding basic geometry or the "opinion" that 1+1=5 while understanding math. These are not opinions, they are expressions of willful or accidental ignorance.
I feel religious dogma and organized religion must take some of the blame. As an example other than evolution (too easy): I am a physician, and my assistant at a previous job was actually irritated that the public school was trying to teach her child about plate tectonics and this "crazy pangea" theory. She was looking for me to comiserate as if to ask "Can you believe they're trying to say that the earth moved around and continents split apart?!?" Her church apparently was speaking out against the public school's curriculum in this matter and she followed along. The various church services (Protestant) I've attended have never been very open to independent thought or skepticism.
I'm sure others may have better examples.
"Never memorize something that you can look up."
--Albert Einstein
Yes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, noted believer of and prognosticator on the existence of fairies.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I thought it was 75% myself since I remember my science teacher saying that in like third grade. That was back when we rode our dinosaurs to school.
Actually your correct but the thing is that way to many people forget the science they had learned because they never really need it.
Of course I have seen such silly stuff here on Slashdot that I doubt that it is restricted to joe six pack.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Judging from your poor use of capitalization, punctuation, spelling and basic grammar, I would guess that you are a product of one of the local high schools.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/12/californian_science_dunces/ Even if it was right, having one of the answers at or near the end of the ranges offered all but guarantees that a high proportion will get it wrong. It's trivia; I may well have checked either 61-70 or 71-80 depending on mood.
It should be noted, though, that Conan Doyle was a loon.
That is a HUGE part of the problem with people being dumb. It has become acceptable in our society to call wrong answers 'opinion', and of course 'opinions' are not right or wrong.
Most people do not seem to understand that you can make a statement of fact that is wrong. They believe that a statement of fact by definition is only the right answers.
Even fewer realize that if I say 'My favorite color is magenta.', that I have just made a statement of fact. It is a statement of fact about my opinion. In this case it is a false statement of fact, as magenta is in fact, not my favorite color.
What are the odd that your international friends are less typical than your American acquaintances? Non-zero?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Opinion question? Whether humans (who have been around for less than a million years no matter how loosely you define human) and dinosaurs (which have been dead for over 60 million years"
And obviously you were there to know this as fact.
As if we can be absolutely sure that carbon dating is accurate to that length of time. As if we can be absolutely sure of anything over 2000 years ago. What, do you have a time machine?
The above is not worth reading.
And asking if someone believes for religious purposes that humans and dinosaurs coexisted despite scientific evidence to the contrary. is an opinion question.
There... fixed it for you.
This is funny to me. While these "scientists" are playing with their stupid little "I'm smarter than you" studies, the people that "fail at science" are the ones making the world go round.
"Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy."
Balderdash. BULLSHIT! How else would we know the approximate weight of the planet without knowing the weight of water and how much water is on the planet's surface to add to the weight of everything else?
Facts are a part of scientific literacy. Without facts there would be no scientific literacy, just postulation and speculation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
>And no, this is no strawman. The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart >and clearly established,
That would be where you get the arguments. A very good friend of mine is very religious and is a
creationist. We have had this discussion before. The creationists do not accept uniformitarianism nor do they believe in carbon-14 dating (you can't prove that carbon didn't decay faster 200 years ago because no one was measuring it back then. So if carbon decay is faster then all those carbon-14 dates are way off...).
She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.
Preposterous! As any fule kno, a man's brain is nothing like that at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
in later stories it came out, though, that holmes did possess much more general knowledge (and especially about copernican theory) than he admitted in "study in scarlet", so it is very much possible that holmes is pulling watson's leg at this point.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Instead of merit pay, how about we actually untie teachers' hands when it comes to cirriculum and let them teach in a way that doesn't involve memorization drills for standardized tests and does involve actual interaction and learning?
I disagree.
Knowledge of basic information about our world is vital for making good decisions in the voting booth.
Either we should expect the average person to have at least a 6th-grade understanding of how the world works, or we should abandon our current conception of democracy for one less direct that only expects the voters to understand local issues and to be able to judge the character and wisdom of people in their own community, with those trusted community members choosing the next level of representative and so on.
Perhaps a good start would be some crazy reforms like having people vote for a representative to choose the president on their behalf rather than voting directly for the candidate, or having state legislatures choose federal senators.
But I digress: my point is, if you don't expect the average person to know simple things like this, you must admit that democracy on a large scale is fundamentally flawed and even dangerous.
In the Eagle County where I grew up they tried Merit Pay for teachers right after I graduated. It was interesting to say the least. The teachers, who were all quite good, became unhappy and started leaving in droves. Test scores plummeted. It took years before the board finally admitted that it was wrong and reverted back.
It turns out, teachers teach because they love children and an environment where they are teaching because they love money and competing with each other is NOT beneficial. Thinking back to my favorite teacher(and the one I learned the most from), he definitely was my favorite because I felt he was invested in me, and he was not the best paid.
http://digg.com/pc_games/World_of_Warcraft_the_Scientific_Method
Most people spend upwards of 12,000 hours in school (not counting homework time). You might think that they could be taught a little bit of science in that time.
It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
Huh? No. Not a matter of opinion, since there is no scientifically credible theory that would postulate co-existence of humans and dinosaurs.
While theoretically possible that one could understand scientific process and principles in detail, but not accept or apply it, I think it is fair to claim that such an intersection is very very small. So if claim is based on this possibility, that would be nitpicking.
But I totally agree with the triviality of perentage of the global covered by water question.
Education Board Leader Set to Challenge Evolution:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/03/08/0308mcleroy.html
This is the guy that heads the Board of Education in the State of Texas. The second largest state in the United States by population (23,904,380 people).
Uh... we clearly have very different definitions of what is and is not science.
Or, to put it another way, as far as I'm concerned in order to understand science, you have to understand that you can't pick and choose what parts of science you like because of your peculiar opinions. It's sorta, well, essential to the nature of science and all... The belief that dinosaurs and humans coexisted is strictly unscientific.
I think you need both; the facts are important to build on. What's more one would expect, in general, that someone with no basic knowledge of the facts would have little or no exposure to the scientific method.
It's like arguing whether vocabulary or grammar is more important for speaking a language.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And, in many cases, money does not equal improvement. I'm all for some sort of merit-pay system (though exactly how to judge merit would be an issue), but that would still only go so far in making a change.
Too many educators, even at the university level, are just bad. Either they don't care, never learned themselves, or learned wrong. Even at the high school level, I had more than one teacher who's regular daily plan was to have us open our textbooks and read aloud in class. You don't learn anything from that. Even if there was some discussion afterwards, most of it still went in one ear and out the other.
If we want to fix American education, we need to change the way that the education system thinks. Considering the advances of the lass century, a good majority is still sticking to ideas from somewhere around the 12th century.
1) Memorization is out, critical thinking is in.
We have the internet. We have Google. Even if all of technology were to fail today, we would still have public libraries. Rote memorization is a worthless skill these days, except in very specific fields; even then, you shouldn't have to do it until you reach college level. Information doesn't need to be stored in our minds, just noted and looked up later.
The downside is that this massive amount of information can be hard to parse, which is why we have to pair the removal of memorization with the introduction of critical thinking exercises. We need to be teaching the kids not just to ask questions, but how they should ask them and what kinds to ask. Right now the mentality is that kids should just shut up and learn. Critical thinking is a skill that will help them far beyond even university, regardless of what path they take in life.
2) Closed-book testing is out
Now, I'm not saying we should sit kids in front of a search engine with each test, but too many tests require memorization of stuff that really doesn't need to be memorized. Instead of seeing if someone can remember tan(3/4) or the derivative of sec^-1(), give them a list of common functions and then put harder problems on the test. The whole "no calculator" thing also seems kind of blech, though for more basic problems I do agree on it.
I had one professor (a rather brilliant and geeky CS prof) who would make homework absolutely brutal, quizzes hard, and tests moderately difficult. In this way, when we were tested it was actually easier, whereas you normally expect and get the opposite. Math-based classes should give weekly quizzes that are difficult and no calculator allowed, and regular tests that are easier and allow a calculator.
If a class like American History must do a test, it should be an essay one, allowing students to have their own notes. Ask questions that require students to analyze events, not regurgitate them. It doesn't matter what years we had the American Revolution, at least not compared to the reason we had it. If a kid can say that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and that the American Revolution started about that same time, but not why we did those things or the motivations for the Boston Tea Party, then in my view he's learned nothing. Fine, do some quick-fact sheet for the first ten minutes, then switch over to open-note and essay.
However, I'd prefer that in lieu of tests, these kinds of classes did reports and presentations. Do debates in Government classes, grading on the amount of thought put into arguments.
3) Engage the kids
I would even say that note-taking is old and busted. When kids are taking notes, they can't pay attention, except to the extremely immediate which they forget after putting it on paper. I found that, at least in my math classes, I learned far more when I wrote nothing (while watching the rest of the class scribble furiously) during class than when I wrote pages.
This isn't saying notes are bad--certainly, in a relevant class kids should take notes on the big and important items--but lik
Claiming religious belief is absurd. If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
Science assumes that only inviolate, physical laws are relevant. If someone suspects that these axioms are not always true, the scientific method cannot prove them wrong. Failing to understand and respect the limits of science is much more worrying than ignorance of trivia.
What caused your user ID to mutate?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's scientific accepted fact. Secondly, carbon dating is not used on dinosaur fossils. Carbon-14 is limited to about 50,000 years. There are many, many more methods of dating such as potassium-argon and uranium-thorium. You'd do well to actually research a topic before you attempt to discuss it.
f I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion?
So you're going to claim that something which happened millions of years ago is anywhere near as provable as something that is clearly seen by every human eye on the planet and every instrument we can point at the sky today?
The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart and clearly established, that the only way to have them live together would be if we had a deity who interceded in direct physical ways constantly. And if you accept that, then the scientific method is just as worthless as if you regularly deny the visual evidence of 6 billion people the world over when it comes to the color of the grass and the sky.
I can't speak for all religious beliefs, but the people that I deal with believe for the most part that God interceded in a direct, physical way in a way that He never will again while creating the earth and that, now, He let's the universe go along according to natural laws with very little direct intercession. Your logic breaks down at the point where you assume their belief, ie "the only way to have them live together would be if we had a deity who interceded in direct physical ways constantly". It would be absurd for them to think that the world doesn't act according to natural laws.
It'd be like me claiming that you don't understand the world and science because you're claiming that a belief in creation precludes an ability to do science while it's very obvious that people like Newton were able to do just that. You are making a claim that can't be (ethically) proven experimentally, and you're making that claim without any attempt to provide evidence. Since you believe something for which there is evidence to the contrary, by your logic you have no scientific understanding. How is that any less fallacious than your argument?
I disagree. I think understanding and applying the scientific method is the foundation of science, which is just one method of critical thought. Any particular facts a person knows or does not know may be reflective of their opinions about science, or it may be reflective of their particular interests and cultural influences.
My university is pushing that idea. The notion that we should be teaching people to think, and evaluating their ability to do so, in some way completely abstracted from any factual knowledge. Every thing they describe as "thinking" really boils down to the ability to manipulate facts and observations in some kind of logically consistent fashion, so the absence of factual knowledge precludes critical or scientific thinking in the same way that the absence of premises precludes logical argument.
It used to be that primary education focused itself on instilling the basic facts, language, and rules that people need to form a foundation for further and more abstract learning. Recently, it's become popular to try to teach students the process of thinking without giving them anything to think about. I agree that, to a large extent, the abstract thinking processes are similar for any specific topic, so it should be possible to abstract or generalize them from the context, but you can't actually teach thinking, or learning, or whatever the fashionable buzzword of the year is, without a set of basic factual tokens to manipulate.
If we really are a culture that admires "science," then we ought to expect that as many people know how much water is on the planet as know who won American Idol last year. That this is not true implies that we're a culture that romanticizes science, but would really rather have a chocolate milkshake.
Did I just come to the horrible guy-wrenching realization that teachers are not paid based on their performance?
She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.
This is not an attempt to insult your friend, but being good at math or some other subject does not necessarily mean you are a smart person. Being smart means you are capable of thinking critically and rationally about any subject, even ones you may not fully understand. But you will weigh the evidence objectively to form your opinion. I would personally not consider someone who believes in creationist garbage science, or someone who firmly believes that faith trumps reason a smart person.
That's a very small sample size, and it includes only people who:
In short, it is a survey of lonely people with nothing better to do.
So let's rename the article "Bored lonely idle American adults fail basic scientific literacy'.
Though IMHO the sample used doesn't even prove that much.
ok let's start with simpler things.
How many states are there?
Three: Solid, Liquid, Gas.
How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
Three: Federal, State/Provincial, Municipal
How many stripes and stars are on the USA flag?
It depends on the year. Currently there are 63.
Name 3 countries in europe.
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan
Name 3 countries in Asia.
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan
Name 3 countries in south america.
The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, France
Name 3 countries in north america.
The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, France
(You gotta love transcontinental countries, and overseas protectorates.)
Explain how you can calculate your approximate destination time from your speed and distance.
The time at a destination changes approximately by one hour for every fifteen degrees of longitude. It will not be affected by speed, although at relativistic velocities the traveller's perception is that time slows down.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
While I agree with your basic hypothesis about grammar and programming, I also want to point out that as long as that programmer makes the same spelling "mistake" consistently, the program will still work.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The problem with "teaching the concepts", which I agree is a great idea, is that it is exceedingly hard for students to exceed their teachers. Given who's teaching in America that is a necessary condition for even basic intelligence.
Knowledge, and exercise solution methods can be taught to kids by a monkey, and some kids will actually grow to understand the theory, even if the monkey doesn't have a clue.
While the "concepts and ideas" teaching can only work insofar the teacher masters the concepts and the ideas (s)he's trying to teach to kids.
And some days it seems the purpose of education unions is to put incompetent teachers before kids. They have succeeded in a great many schools.
Better go with facts teaching,memorization and repetition. You're absolutely right that it would not be appropriate in university, where lectures are given by people who do research and discover new things, and therefore can confidently be said to have mastered what they're teaching.
Don't do it in public schools.
And for the love of God, don't make exceptions for "smart" teachers. 2 groups of people consider themselves above average : the low end of mediocre performers and people who completely screw up the subject. People who actually master a subject rate their own performances as "average" or "can be improved", at best. Furthermore, being "smart" is an evolving attitude, not a steady state.
Teachers who do not dedicate part of their lives to improve their knowledge of a subject will never be capable of teaching the concepts. Since this is not something that can realistically (within any reasonable budget) be asked of teachers, just forget about it.
To get some more science literacy, check out http://www.calacademy.org/. To test your already existing scientific literacy, take this Richard Carrier literacy test. If you're already confident in your knowledge, here's what other people do not know:
.(*)
* 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.
The linked scientific literacy test is a series of true/false questions dealing with the scientific method and no questions about random scientific facts. So the article itself proves it doesn't know the difference between scientific fact trivia and scientific literacy.
Facts are great, but they are readily available. In any textbook there are tables of facts just waiting for someone to use them. Why bother memorizing the percentage of Earth's surface that is covered by water? If I need that particular bit of information for something that I am doing, I know where to find it.
The fact that more people can't come up with a reasonable guess speaks to their ability to think about the question, but it has nothing to do with scientific literacy. Same for the motion of the Earth. If they took a second to actually think about it I bet most people could come up with the right answer.
First off, we don't use carbon dating for the dates more than a few tens of thousands of years ago (it's pretty useless beyond 60000 years), rather, we use potassium-argon or uranium-lead, but I get your point.
Regardless, we aren't operating in a vacuum here. For short dates (such as those relevant to the age of humans) it is possible to calibrate if other physical evidence was preserved (I seem to recall using tree rings as an secondary calibration cue). And we do acknowledge the lack of accuracy, it's why we don't give exact dates, but rather a range (usually X years before present +-Y for the range).
I never said we know that dates down to the tens, or even thousands place. But it would take a hell of a deviation to make 1 million and 65 million come within striking distance of one another. We do test in an ongoing fashion, how these isotopes decay, and there has been no change in the time we've been able to observe, nor is there any evidence for an external factor that would accelerate or decelerate decay that I am aware of, only minor adjustments due to sample contamination. If you want to argue that the decay of various isotopes changes randomly, and more importantly, significantly, over time, be my guest, but unless you have some basis for your claims its not scientific thinking, it's wishful.
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What does 2000 years ago have to do with anything?
And carbon dating is not useful for things older than about 60,000 years. For older things other types of radiometric dating are used, as are other methods, such as identifying an objects position in the geologic column.
Even aside from the "possibility" of multi-million year errors in dating, Homo and Australopithecus fossils (indeed, all primate fossils) are found in layers far above the last layers containing dinosaur remains.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I would say they should do exactly the opposite with truancy laws. Truancy laws create criminals. They do not improve education. The first thing that needs to be done is to openly admit that people really only need about a (proper) 6th grade education to function just fine in society. Most people are doing it right now. Many of them are doing quite well. They just spent 13+ years getting that 6th grade education. From there we can assess what are the importing pieces of education, and what are not.
You languish in apprenticeships called post-docs for years while waiting for a real job to open up.
Or you canned by the time you are 40.
You can't prove the universe existed five minutes ago either, without relying on some basic assumptions of stasis. As I said, if we have a deity who constantly tinkers with physical laws, this all goes out the window, but then, if you're assuming that, you're already thrown scientific thinking out the window.
As soon as your friend shows how the decay of a radioactive isotope can be significantly affected by external stimuli that could reasonably be expected to be encountered on this planet (for example, the core of a star manages to create radioactive elements, but I think it may be hard to prove this was occurring inside fossilized bones), I'll take her seriously. Until then, she's not thinking scientifically, starting from evidence and forming theories, she's thinking religiously, starting from belief, and discarding evidence.
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I always hated that about Sherlock Holmes and here's why: The brain, for all intents and purposes, can store limitless amounts of information. Not only that, but the more information (connections) we have, the greater our ability to reason and make new connections. Knowing p -> q can help you when you run into 'something similar to p' you might make the leap, 'something similar to p' -> 'q or something similar to q'. The mind is not a bucket to be filled.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Mod +infinity Insightful.
You, sir, have said some of the best things I have read in awhile.
And I submit that willful ignorance of any kind is damaging to humanity as a whole.
I don't get it.
And this affects Joe Schmoe how? Knowing how much water is on the planet helps him in his desk job how? It helps him pay his bills how? It helps him keep his marriage together how? Knowing who last year's American Idol was might win him tickets from a radio show or keep him connected with his daughters, or give him a conversation topic with his boss. More often than not, people know pretty damn close to exactly how much they need to know to survive. (don't hate me or mod me down--playing devil's advocate here.)
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Why would you think I disagree with them? I entirely agree that correlation isn't causation, and anyone who doesn't hasn't understood what either word means. It's trivially true. That means pointing it out is redundant. Sadly, the comment also guarantees karma points if you're quick enough, so any karma whore with nothing on their mind will try to post it. But it's never, ever, an actually insightful comment.
When you look at the night sky, many of the things you see did happen millions of years ago.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Japan, China:
Behind USA in scientific research, but apply it fast for civilian use.
USA:
Bleeding edge scientific research, but not for civilian use.
Look, MagLev, Concord, AI-controlled robotic news reporters etc. , these idea comes from research in the U.S. , but only visible in East Asian countries to adopt.
That is the reason why we have crappy public transportation systems.
New Economic Perspectives
Important distinction: A belief in creationism doesn't prevent you from engaging in science (though depending on how literally you hew to it, it may be an impediment to certain aspects of biology), but it's directly antithetical to scientific modes of thought. Scientific modes of thought require you to start from evidence, develop theories, and test them. None of that applies to creationism. If an all powerful deity did manage to create the world in seven days, he made a pretty impressive back story for it. As I noted in another response though, you could just as easily say the world started five minutes ago, and all our memories were created with it. It's a great theory, but without either evidence or any way to test it, it's not science.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Seriously... Americans are first and foremost a practical people that tend to amass their skills in that which they are trying to accomplish.
The percentage of earth covered in water, the relative masses of the planets, the orbits and fairly irrelevant. It's trivia, not practical knowledge.
Like, my brother in law runs a body shop. He could care less about even the names of the planets. But he could tell me the relative merits and tradeoffs behind the wiring kits of American cars versus those of higher mercedes sedan. He could tell me the proper mixture of a blowtorch. And, when he gets home, he builds all his computers, has installed his own dual heating system, with an oil heat on one and then, for pinches, has a central wood / coal burning stove. He's completely self sufficient, thrifty, curious but in a practical way, and I admire him a great deal for what he's done.
Is he the kind of guy that would know about water percentage or other stupid "science" trivia? No. But is he the kind of guy that builds a country. Yes.
The problem with science training isn't that we don't have enough science books, but that we do not have enough science experiments. Science isn't about reading a bunch of crap. It's about building stuff.
We need more vocational education and bridges from vocational work to full out engineering degrees, more than we need anything else.
You can nitpick the analogy if you like, but the notion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted is not an opinion. It simply did not occur. If you insist that it did, you are wrong. You can insist, or "believe", all you want but you are still wrong.
Interesting approach. I thought that paragraph sounded familiar. But....
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.
While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have gotten a lot of things right, he also got a lot of things wrong. Including the assumption that memorizing one fact elbows out another.
I think there's some merit to the description that specialists are, well, specialized. After all, there's the joke about studying so much until you know everything about nothing. And there's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong, however, is to assume that what you don't know doesn't matter, or that your opinion on a subject you don't know matters as much as the opinion of someone who has studied that matter.
To me, the troubling aspect is not that people don't know how much water covers the earth. It is that they assume their incomplete knowledge is actually true, or that anyone who knows it is wasting his/her time.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This is why degree courses in Klingon exist.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand.
This is the only thing you wrote that I disagree with. Kids naturally want to learn, and by that I mean understand and develop critical thinking abilities. It's required for growth and beneficial to develop these abilities. It's hard to teach kids to memorize things that don't help them understand the world around them. It takes years of indoctrination and enforced blind obedience to authority to get kids to perform rote memorization.
I generally agree with everything else you said.
Maybe. But not knowing that the earth takes one year to revolve around the sun indicates a pretty serious failure to know what the fuck is going on.
Doesn't the earth orbit the sun?
Strictly speaking, the UK's dependencies are not part of the UK. The French DOMs and TOMs however are. Part of France, I mean. It would just be stupid for French overseas territories to be part of the UK. The Dutch? Meh, they're all under water anyway.
But I see where you're coming from. The first thing I thought about the states question was exactly the same. The second was "how about plasma?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was under the impression that there were at least four phases of matter: you missed out plasma. According to a random chemistry web page, Bose-Einstein condensate is also a distinct phase, but that was never covered in my A-level physics or chemistry.
Critical thinking skills? you are asking the morons that travel at 85mpg 6 feet from the guy in front of him to think critically when they cant comprehend that their actions daily on the highway are incredibly stupid?
Traveling at 85mpg? Who is the moron?
2 Points First, formal education is badly broken, and the more poeple have of it, the less they seem to see it. What is the usefulness of a headfull of facts? Education is obsessed with teaching us a certain set of facts and a certain worldview and falls woefully short on teaching people to think for themselves. How important is it that somebody know a list of facts including what percentage of the earth is water and how long it takes the earth to go around the sun. If you're in an applicable field I think you should know. If you're an average man on the street, you have wasted whatever time it took you to learn that. It won't affect where you live, what kind of apartment or house you live in, what kind of car you drive, what you choose to believe about anything, whether or not you can balance a bank account, whether or not you have honor and integrity, whether or not you can treat those around you with love & respect. There's a long list of people that have their high school diploma as well as college, university, graduate school, etc etc, and have learned none of the basic life skills that are key to a "fulfilled" life. And then people are horrified at the number of people that don't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun? ...?
Secondly, I am absolutely astounded at the number of people on here that cling to evolutionary theory as a form of sacred cow. They seem to allow for no errors, no holes. They seem to believe that it has been "proved" beyond a shadow of a doubt. Wow. It gets better. They equate it with good science. In fact, it seems to be king bee of science. Going back to education, I remember being taught in the first grade that science has to be duplicated to be proved true. I know I live in Canada, but have I missed some big event over the last several centuries of science? I've heard of theories regarding the fossil record. I can even buy into micro evolution as it has been proved. But that "educated" people are absolutely positively convinced on sequences of events that nobody witnessed are hard for me to fathom. I work in IT and see myself and other techs have theories that are proved wrong all the time in computer related issues which in the end are far less complicated than the origin of life... especially as studied millions/billions of years after the fact. And then they smugly assume that they are on the moral high ground as they look down on those lesser individuals who dare to differ in belief or opinion when their own belief is far from proven.
She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.
This is an extremely common misconception based on the lies of philosophers and armchair scientists. It's not that faith > reason for these people. That's ridiculous and whoever is trying to tell you that is trying to manipulate you. It's that faith > current views.
You have to understand that these people recognize that something unseen moves their life the same way that unseen wind can move trees. It's not an observable phenomena, as far as they're concerned, but to them it's more real than any of our current measurements can accurately observe. Let's face it. If you were to fall into a time machine and get stuck back in the 1400's and try to explain bacterias to people as manipulative, stiff-necked, and unreasonable as today's philosophers and armchair scientists, they would laugh you out! 'Unseen animals that are everywhere, making us sick, processing our foods in our bellies, aging our cheese, and everything else... yes, sure, magical animals -- too small to see, of course, except in the future where we have instruments that let us see them. Keep talking Futureman!'
To say that people and dinosaurs certainly did not coexist is based on a lack of fossil evidence. How is it, then, reasonable to tell people they are idiots for not jumping to conclusions that humans and dinosaurs never coexisted? Elementary students could even call this shit out after their first science fair.
To say that dinosaurs didn't exist is an inference based on a lack of evidence. However, the claim that dinosaurs could have coexisted with humans has evidence (google: Mokele-Mbembe, Cadborosaurus, Kongamoto). None of this can be considered proof or very strong evidence, but it sure as hell trumps a lack of evidence.
There's a reason why the scientific method doesn't come to a screeching halt at "hypothesis"; because that's the beginning of the method, and not the end. Telling people they don't accept reason because they question a hypothesis is idiocy, manipulation, unreasonable, and (sadly) the popular thing to do nowadays. Don't let this be you. </rant>
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I wish I could get 85 mpg. Is 6 feet the proper distance for a good draft?
Critical thinking skills? you are asking the morons that travel at 85mpg 6 feet from the guy in front of him to think critically when they cant comprehend that their actions daily on the highway are incredibly stupid? If someone can travel at 85 mpg, more power to him. I don't think a Prius gets much better than 45. Why are you so against good gas mileage?
I will say that I know for a fact that there are some private christian schools who teach that dinosaurs and people lived together because this is the only way they can explain creationism and reconcile the fact that dinosaurs existed. I have actually seen one of these "alternate history" textbooks and I read this information for myself. This is an actual published work that is being used in some schools. I was appalled to see that this many people believed this, but I think that maybe there should be more rules concerning what is taught. I certainly don't believe creationism belongs in the classroom. It belongs in sunday school. A child can figure out how to reconcile these two beliefs for themselves but it certainly shouldn't be taught as fact. Facts require scientific evidence.
But all the layers got shuffled around during Noah's Flood!
(No, I'm not being serious, but unfortunately that's the argument you'd get from people who believe that sort of thing. Apparently, those were some magic flood waters.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The real question is, how many people can identify what plants crave? And how many people know what electrolytes are?
Your post reminded me of the barometer problem. I'm sure you were trying to make the same point.
After plasma there's quark-gluon plasma.
And then there're a number of states that scientists think are likely to exist, but haven't actually observed yet. e.g. Degenerate matter in the core of white dwarfs and neutron stars.
No, it's basic geographic information.
Huh, I can't believe i've never though of the speed of light aspect of the 6000 YO earth arguement. If the bible were literally true, which they do say, the night sky would be a hell of a lot darker, even giving light that couple day head start before the earth was made :D
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Everything I know about science I got from http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
How many states are there?
How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
How many stripes and stars are on the USA flag?
Yes, I also think that requiring that all Americans pass their own citizenship test annually, or else lose the right to vote, would be a good idea. ~
>The creationists do not accept uniformitarianism nor do they believe in carbon-14 dating (you can't prove that carbon didn't decay faster 200 years ago because no one was measuring it back then. So if carbon decay is faster then all those carbon-14 dates are way off...).
She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.
She can't prove that having a masters in math makes her "smart" either. Picking and choosing to attack branches of science like Radiometric dating is the last bastion of the "blissfully ignorant". Does she wear a watch? If so, does she continually "prove" to herself that seconds from now are the same length as seconds from 10 hours ago? Can she "prove" that "leap years" are necessary? Does she use a calendar? Why does she accept these forms of time measurement and not radiometric dating?
Utterly ridiculous, and yet not at all unexpected considering the "logic" of creationists.
As a friend, perhaps you should provide her with a copy of "Science, Evolution and Creationism" from the National Academy of Science and show her the pages that deal with the absurdity of "disbelieving" radiometric dating.
I can understand Americans not knowing stuff but the TV teaches lots. Like, I didn't know dinosoars had names until I watched the flinstone's. I guess people from the trailer park learn from the TV faster.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The fundamental problem with our current system of education is that we're paying $35k a year for a $75k job.
We simply don't want to pay for the quality we'd like to have. There's no way around that.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It's not a matter of "absolutely sure", it's a matter of statistics. When someone uses carbon dating to find out how old something is, they might say "I know within 95% confidence that this object is between 21,500 and 22,000 years old", or "I know within 99.9% confidence that this object is between 10,000 and 30,000 years old."
We have used these measuring techniques over small and large periods of time, and the data matches the hypothesis. Where the data doesn't match the hypothesis, we don't assume the negation of the hypothesis, we change our theory to match the new data. This is the basis of the scientific method.
How can you be so sure of anything that happened less than 2000 years ago? Our data tells us with a certain amount of accuracy what happened throughout all of history, and our theories are revised whenever new data is discovered.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
"you must admit that democracy on a large scale is fundamentally flawed and even dangerous."
For years I've been saying "Vote as if it mattered." and working at the polls. I have noticed, OTOH, that Americans tend to uphold their privilege to be ignorant, to the point of death. I believe our country was founded in an anomalous period, "The Enlightenment", and our Founding Fathers erroneously assumed that reason was not just a passing fad. Whilst not wanting to support the "more of the same" Republican candidate, I was not impressed by the "real change... fersure, fersure" Democratic candidate, nor by the rookie voters that turned up to endorse the illusion. I can't really sustain the illusion myself, and probably won't be doing the poll work any more. It seems that stupidity is the new ethos, and frankly, I don't think I'll be missed. BTW your crazy reforms were in The Constitution as originally adopted, I guess you meant irony.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
There are several definitions for states of matter. I was really debating whether to include plasma. Some people consider plasma to merely be ionized gas. There are all sorts of states of matter: liquid crystals, amorphous solids (glass and synthetic rubbers), superfluids, Bose-einstien condensates and a small host of others. But basically it all boils down to Molecules rigidly bound (solid), Molecules loosely bound (liquid), Molecules not bound (gas).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
One cannot understand sediment and fossilization and then believe that all the evidence is false.
Surely you mean the lack of evidence? You can't have evidence that proves that mankind didn't live with the dinosaurs. You can only have a lack of evidence that they did. We believe very strongly that they did not co-exist, but we can not be 100% because science does not allow us to prove something based on the absence of evidence of the antithesis.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You missed a few:
1. Name 3 countries in Africa.
2. Name 3 countries in Australia.
funnily enough scientists claim belief in *something* in their experiments where they show 'how life was made'. they dont take themselves out of the equation, therefore showing even in there experiments something had to intelligently interact to create basic life. closest they could get is randomly throwing stuff together a couple thousand times to try to get basic life.
I'm not sure about the GP's point, but he's half-right.
There's a difference between being unaware of the established scientific facts, and disbelieving them. They're different issues, and different problems.
These are still factoids, not "science".
A molecular biologist might have no knowledge, or care, about what percentage of the earth is covered in water, or how many days it takes for the earth to orbit the sun.
"Science" means following the scientific theory, and HOW science works. That is where most people fail - that and critical thinking. You can apply the theory to lots of things... if you just spew factoids, you don't actually LEARN.
Give a man a taco, he eats for a day. Teach a man to... wait, I messed up.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
you say that we go round the sun.
Of course, we have to draw the line somewhere and decide what is an example of what we consider an acceptable level of scientific knowledge.
To some, it is enough to say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. To others, it is necessary to say that the Earth revolves around the sun. To still others, it is necessary to say that the Earth and the sun both interplay and revolve around each other, albeit the gravitational attraction of the Sun is 330,000**2 number of times more influential than the Earths, and that the Earth is also affected by the gravitational attraction not only of other solar system bodies, but even by that of a hydrogen atom on the far side of the universe. Having betrayed my own level of scientific understanding, there are probably levels even beyond this at which people look down their noses at people like me whose only understanding is that every particle in the universe acts on every other particle in the universe.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge. If I need to know how much of the planet is covered in water (I'd guess 80%), I look it up, and decide if the definition matches my needs.
Scientific literacy would be understanding (1) how to research science you need (2) how to conduct a proper experiment (3) how to evaluate claims for obvious falsehood (4) how to check out non-obvious claims for falsehood, which is related to #1, (5) how to identify whether you are yourself competent in an area of science, or not, and (6) how to find someone who *is* competent, if necessary.
I hate it when people mistake factoids for science.
I hate it when people mistake popular blurbs for reason.
Best post ever, you are exactly right. Who wants to be a millionaire is not science.
I would say the people out there that actually really understand science is much worse than that.. all the people who believe in the crazy garbage we were all told growing up like "Don't go swimming after eating" Why did people believe that? Because they believed that the blood would pool in your stomach in order to help you digest food in the god damed dark ages.
I don't think we need more teachers.. most of the time they themselves are full of bias and even the books are wrong.. We need more people asking questions about what we all know is true like Penn and Teller.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
If, for dramatic purposes, Sherlock Holmes needed to solve a case by determining the length of shadows (or some crappy clue like that) cast by the moon and sun on a particular day, I'm sure the Copernican theory would be conveniently remembered...
Or in other words, unless you want to meld your brain to Google and Wikipedia, it helps to remember a few facts.
While it is certainly not useless, it is trivial to know it to a high level of precision. If I thought it was 75% would that mean I didn't understand this essential information? What about 80%? 85%? What point do you make the cutoff? Or we could go the other way. I could say you don't have a good understanding because you said it was 70% when it is actually 70.9%.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html#Geo
Keep trying, you'll construct a coherent sentence sooner or later.
Wow, that is quite possibly the worst argument I've read in defense of ignorance! Just because you don't need a particular piece of knowledge doesn't mean that you shouldn't have it. Strictly speaking, humans don't need anything beyond, food & shelter. Applying that logic, the society would not evolve beyond rubbing sticks together to make fire, completely ignorant of the fact that magnesium flame is much hotter, and is much more convenient.
One may argue that figuring out the properties of magnesium is the job of a chemist, and that would make sense. Except it doesn't hurt -you- to think for yourself and try to broaden your horizons. Ultimately, in the end, it boils down to how much or how little you want to do. Staying in your little corner of the world is only one step up from complete stupidity.
In addition, the religious arguments for biblical literalism are deeply flawed as well.
St Augustine rejected biblical literalism 1600 years ago (there may well have been other before him). I would have thought that the evidence against it that has accumulated since would convince just about anyone.
I wonder how much influence The Flintstones various silly films have on this?
How about being able to do basic math so you understand that the 15% you will save opening that store credit card to buy that item will cost you 30% more even if you go home and pay it off right now due to dropping your credit score like a stone.
Are you stoned? First, you cannot say "cost you 30%" because you have nothing to apply. It does not apply to the discounted store purchase. It does not apply to fixed rate loans. Variable rate loans of consequence are most likely fixed to T-bills. If one is paying credit card interest, I doubt many lenders increase rates for opening up a line of credit elsewhere (although that would not surprise me but it is wholly not relevant to the discussion here). There are reasons to not take that 15%: pain of canceling, too many lines of credit may reduce your credit score (it could also increase your credit score if you have too few and this new line demonstrates your prudence and financial restraint).
As I understand credit scores - and that is very little - you want to have existing credit line that you don't max out and you want a long record of paying your bills on time consistently.
The scientific method, logical skepticism, and research skills are the end game, but a working knowledge of basic facts is an important practical foundation.
For example, what does 9x7=? You know the answer immediately because you memorized a look-up table of basic facts when you were young. Those facts allow you to perform more complicated algorithms when you need to, such as base10 long division. Basic scientific facts help you in the same way.
You do not have the time to experimentally derive that information. And that's just knocking-around-the-house stuff. Heaven forbid that we try anything less-than-obvious, e.g.,
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
If you count water vapor nearly 100% of the earth is covered in water, hah!
Or even more likely, A.C. Doyle's opinion on what Holmes should know changed over the time of writing the stories.
I am officially gone from
No problem at all, get a smart (diesel variant).
And travel 6 feet behind someone, so you can use the draft ;)
Wow... How ironic that that in a article on literacy, you have some really poor grammar....
HDGary secures my bank
If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.
Okay, I won't call it a strawman, but it is certainly a questionable example.
A better one would be if you were raised to believe that at some point in the past, the sky was red. (Purple grass currently exists, native to northern Africa I believe, so makes for a bad example.) The plain truth is that neither you nor I have any direct experience of what the sky looked like millions of years ago, and a red sky is an entirely plausible concept. There may be a total lack of evidence for both cases, in which case it is obviously a matter of opinion. There may be more evidence for a red sky in the past than a blue sky, in which case it is a matter of how much faith one places in the evidence, and thus at its root still a matter of opinion.
Let's say for example that a series of dreadfully ancient cave paintings were found and all of them that had sky in the background showed it as being red. This is still not a lot of evidence to go on, but it is again plausible to believe that the sky was (at least local to the cave painters) red. It is also plausible to believe that sunset had a special significance for the painters' culture, so they depicted only sunsets (sans sun, naturally, because that would make it too easy...er, i mean, it was too holy to make an image of) in their paintings, and the limited set of colors they had to work with resulted in a uniform red.
Which of these is more plausible? I don't know. I don't know if the chemical makeup of the atmosphere would permit a red sky while supporting human life, but that would be another source of evidence for or against its existence. Your opinion will be swayed by the amount of evidence that you see for each side, and what you count as "evidence" rests on the amount of trust you place in whoever did the calculations or found the paintings or what have you. The whole point of this example is to demonstrate that yes, the past really is a matter of opinion or, if you prefer, "open to interpretation." Witness the revisionist histories and continuing debates of the US: was Lincoln a great liberator or a strong authoritarian? What does the 2nd Amendment really mean? What caused the beginning and end of the Great Depression?
Now, back to dinosaurs. We have a lot of fossil evidence pointing to dinosaurs and man being separated by great gulfs of time. This evidence relies upon our geological model of strata, carbon dating, and likely a bunch of other things that I'm too ignorant to know about--I was never very interested in dinosaurs. However, there is also evidence, including cave paintings amusingly enough, of dinosaurs coexisting and interacting with man. See the images here; I am aware that the page is advocating coexistence due to creationism but the evidence stands on its own. It is possible that each and every painting, relief, and figurine could be explained away and require no coexistence, but it is statistically unlikely. Yet nobody but the Creationists ever mentions this evidence; because it doesn't fit the standard model it simply gets pushed aside.
This is not the scientific method at work.
In conclusion, we know less than we think we know, only fools are positive, facts are rarely as solid as they appear, etc. It's not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe, as is the case for several other fields of science that I've looked into.
I also wonder why it is perfectly acceptable to be excited over the possibility of not finding the Higgs Boson which, to my understanding, would invalidate the standard model, yet it is not accepta
Your brain is not a computer.
How many states are there?
50
How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
Three: Executive, Legislative, Judical
There, fixed
Wrong, you forgot plasma. Embarrasing.
http://www.bashamlandscape.com/images/Purple_Fountain_Grass_Big.jpg
--
I think you're confusing truth and fact here. If I consider the truth to be that the world sprang fully formed into existence 5 seconds ago, who cares? Does it affect my ability to observe that the world appears much older than that? No. Does it affect my ability to string together such observations into a model of how the world has changed over time and to conduct experiments to test this model? No.
The point is, people can believe whatever useless things they want. I bet you'll find that fanciful delusions and lack of scientific / critical thinking correlate well, but they're by no means equivalent.
That said, the GP's use of 'opinion' does seem odd.
It's easier to teach kids to memorize than to understand.
This is the only thing you wrote that I disagree with. Kids naturally want to learn
I don't mean it is easier for the kids. It's easier for the teacher because they don't have to put in significant effort or actually engage the students. It's easier to just read from the text. Handling the discipline issues that arise from the regiment are old hat.
I agree with your point, but the status quo is almost always easier.
So you say that American schools are terrible, and then say that kids should attend them more often?
Yes they are!
Yes we do!
No we can't!
(change)
113/355 is an upside down cake, er, pi. Accurate to 6 dp I think, but easy to remember.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
3% is the total, but that is all sources. 2/3rds is locked up in icecaps, so that leaves one percent. Of that one percent, most is so polluted (very generally and broadly speaking) now it requires treatment and/or filtration to be drinkable or even to be used in agriculture. And demand is rising so fast, that some geopolitical analysts think there will be expansionist wars over access to water (I subscribe to that notion), beyond what we have now.
Clean fresh water is *the* critical natural resource of the 21st century, forget oil, that's down the list now in importance. Work for professional hydrologists is a good bet for young folks looking for a tech and science career. Going by availability of clean water as a source of national resource wealth, Canada would now be the world's wealthiest nation per capita, for the larger nations.
"Three: Solid, Liquid, Gas."
What about plasma?
"Name 3 countries in europe.
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan"
Beg pardon?..
"Name 3 countries in Asia.
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan"
You got it right this time
"Name 3 countries in north america.
The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, France"
What exactly belongs to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in NA?
PS. Kazakhstan... A European country... Oh, boy
We are still operating under the rules of the Bush administration.
You qualify for Any of the top level positions. Would you like to be director of NASA?
How many words can you think of that describe the sound of something rushing quickly over your head?
Tell us something we didn't know...
It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun.
Hey! Everyone knows that takes a month!
A failure to understand what the opposing viewpoints are does not strengthen your position nor weaken theirs. Simply because you choose to believe what you believe, because its what you believe ("since no religions are correct, no law of science as it is observed today can ever have changed, thus disproving all religions") is a pretty basic kind of circular logic.
Informative, yes, insightful, more so. Reminds me of a troubling question I had recently, what % of our land surface is undisrupted by human "improvement"? Of probably greater import, What % of our ocean's volume is undisrupted by human abuse? WAG (Wild Ass Guess) if 15% of the humans on this planet could grok these two questions, major paradigm shift would occur, and "Western Civilization" could be sustained into the next century. 15% being decidedly unattainable in my neighborhood, I'm rather dismayed by the prospects.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Evolution is enormously falsifiable in any case. It predicts the fossil record will continue to provide more intermediates (which it has spectacularly done over the last 150 years).
Scientifically accepted =\= truth, and if you believe it is you have a poor understanding of history.
This is absolutely true. In my high school, there were so few science and math teachers that they ended up hiring unqualified teachers that preferred to show us football game film from last Friday's game. And those few good teachers we had were certainly "disenfranchised"-- though that might be an understatement. The one teacher who I felt really taught me anything ended up leaving because she couldn't please the bureaucracy of today's public schools. The future of science education is certainly bleak, but I wouldn't stop there. The whole system is a mess that punishes teachers that do things differently--read, "better."
I guess you'd also add as another obvious example, Genetic Modified Foods.
Obvious example: "intelligent design"
Hmmm... let me rant in my turn. The "intelligent design" science nonsense is a reaction to others who use the name of "science" to naysay the Bible. But science has no ability to naysay the Bible. The Bible records historical events which did or did not happen, depending on the opinion of various historians and Biblical scholars. Based on my own experiences and understanding of other archeological and geological records, I am inclined to think that basically, they did happen.
Further, the Bible records communications between intelligent beings that did or did not happen. Based upon my own experiences of such communications, I am again extremely inclined to think that they did happen.
Now, science has no way of naysaying that a communication did or did not happen between me and my wife. Does somebody think that science has a way of naysaying a communication between two intelligent beings, 5000 years ago?!?
That, too, is nonsense science.
Rather, you have people who dogmatically disbelieve the Bible, dogmatically believe certain claims made by certain people in the false name of science, and then claim that science disproves the Bible. Then, you have others who dogmatically believe the Bible, and not understanding science any better (thank you, Dewey, for your wonderful education system) than the first group, come up with intelligent design. They'd be better served by just ignoring the idiot naysayer pseudoscientists. But they don't know any better.
Enough of my rant.
I say that such intelligent communications did occur, and science has nothing on them.
I say further, that they do still happen today.
http://media.tscnyc.org/wmedia/2010916S1.asf
http://davidwilkersontoday.blogspot.com/2009/03/urgent-message.html
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Claiming religious belief is absurd. If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion?
It is. Let us define "daytime" as "any time of the day in which the sun is visible on the sky", and define each color by its most common definition. Now, we can safely state that, as far as my own personal experience determines at least, clear sky on Earth varies between blue, to purple, to red during a typical daytime and as such any possible combination of colors between blue and red is a valid answer to the question.
The grass is a bit trickier, but it depends on both the particular shade of colors you like to call 'green', the particular shade of colors you like to call 'purple', and the particular species of flora you like to call 'grass'.
With no intention to offend, I think this provides a good example for MickLinux's post above. Successfully demonstrating a seemingly trivial expression such as "the grass is green" requires one to precisely define what "grass" is, what "green" means, what characteristics are exclusive to "green" elements, how to measure such characteristics, then determine the margin of error of such experiment. In fact, my 'demonstration' of the sky being blue-and-red above is far from rigurous, though it is merely an example to make my point rather than conclusive proof of anything :)
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Implying truth through lack of evidence is a very common (and one of the simplest) fallacies. Totally unrelated to whether the earth is round as it hasb een proven in many many ways to be true. We have enormous amounts of evidence to prove that. We have no evidence to prove humans and dinosaurs didn't coexist. Not that I believe they did but it isn't something you can prove...
you are asking the morons that travel at 85mpg 6 feet from the guy in front of him...
whats wrong with idling 6 feet behind someone? :p
call me FOSS im the boss with the sauce and the source
And I submit that you're wrong.
Willful ignorance of irrelevant or distasteful information is completely harmless or even beneficial even discounting limited brain storage as a limiting factor.
For example I'm willfully ignorant of the processes through which celebrities are selected for awards Emmys or Grammies or whatever. Because it's not relevant to me and I don't care one whit about a bunch of socialites jacking each other off.
I'm willfully ignorant of the finer points of racial epithets because I find racism to be ignorant, stupid and contemptible.
I'm extremely willfully ignorant of the best way to go about sexually abusing another person, because....well, if I have to explain that to you...
It's one thing for a fictitious character to discount factual celestial science - it's entertaining and gets a reaction out of the reader, which is the point - but it's entirely another for a real person to deliberately remain ignorant of basic facts of the universe we live in.
Question everything
There are many people with this mindset. Even Richard Feynman seemed to think that his brain was limited, and that he would in his lifetime reach the point when "for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before."
However, in reality, you will never reach the capacity of your brain. With proper mnemonics you could remember every conversation you ever had down to the word. In fact, there are people who do just that. Take Solomon Shereshevskii for example.
The true limit on what you can learn is how much time you have to learn. You can devote your life to learning about science, and learn a tremendous amount. However, unless you took the time to learn about other topics, you would know nothing about art, music, or anything else.
Yo, yo, yo, we be down wit da boyz!
All dat science is just a lotta noyz!
We be checkin out da hos while we pimp our ridez
We don't give a fsck about improvin' our minds!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Does that mean you disbelieve in Noah's Flood? Are you sure?
Have you read the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's description of Noah's flood?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenambosy_Chevron
http://geology.com/news/2006/11/chevron-structures-evidence-of-frequent.html
Do I believe the Noah's Flood had to do with the flooding of the Black Sea? No.
I believe that this particular meteor strike, though, could have produced such a flood.
Those 500 foot high chevrons are impressive.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I don't think that's really true. If you were looking at a good map you might be able to guess how much of the Earth is covered in water, but just because you've seen one doesn't mean you can infer it. Even though I know the answer, if I close my eyes and imagine a map of the earth, it looks like it's mostly land mass to me, because whenever I've seen maps, that's what I've focused on. The water is just the background. Someone who doesn't know the answer and just tries to guess from their mental image of a map would not stand a chance, I'd wager.
Don't forget plasma as a state of matter. Federal, State, and Municipal are levels of government, not branches ("vertical", not "horizontal" organization).
Well, Fox News said the sky was puke green and so did my pastor so it must be true.
Theres also a difference between understanding the opposing viewpoint, and making strawmen out of them.
So what do you know about modern art? How about American Idol? Can you tell me how to rebuild the engine on my car, or how many heat pumps I should have for a 2400 square foot house, or how many hurricane clips are required in the frame to meet with south carolina's disaster code?
Or, is only the stuff that you care about important? I think that sort of attitude is damaging to humanity as a whole.
Statements like yours are very facile, and very naive. There are many things that we are willfully ignorant of every day, and it's not damaging to the whole of humanity.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ummm...not bad. You pass...(barely).
For example, there are (at least) 4 states of matter. Liquid, solid, gas, plasma, etc.
Your quaint 'time at a destination' answer, only applies if you are travelling east/west (as opposed to no change if travelling north/south). And how is it 'approximately?', pray tell?
Not to mention the differences between 'speed' and 'velocity'. (One is scalar, the other is vector, etc.)
I could go on, but I gotta catch a train (going from east to west, at non relativistic velocities)...:-)
You'd be surprised that this thought is actually far into the minority. The fact is, that while yes, you can't argue about the color of the sky, because that is observable currently, the 'religious scientists' will keep sticking with the point that 4000 BC is not observable currently, and has not been recorded in any true scientific manner. The basic fact that we've never seen macro-evolution actually occur allows the idea that God could have created the Earth 6000 years ago to still stand. Long jump, I realize. Even the basic idea of macro-evolution actually is defeated in scientific method, due to the fact that it can't be recreated, and has never been observed directly. On the other hand, you wouldn't even have to break the fundamental laws of physics to describe why things can be dated beyond 6000 years though if you include God's touch. Most of our aging processes come from dating things based of percent compositions of isotopes that we know the half-lives of. If you believe in a God with some forethought, which an all-knowing God would of course have, you could reasonably see him creating fossils that were already lacking in specific isotopes, knowing that man would discover the science of half-lives. Now as for why, well, I'll let a real theologian discuss that.
I personally, am anything BUT a Young Earth Creationist, but I do talk to a devote one, and this is the basis for his argument. And it frightens me when I see polls that say that people like him actually far outnumber people like me. From a online poll (linked below), 44% of Americans still believe in YEC. 38% believe in Old Earth Creationism (God-guided evolution basically). Only 14% of Americans believe in true atheistic evolution.
The bottom line is we don't have visual or even second-hand evidence of anything before the invention of alphabet and writing leaves a lot of people in disbelief of evolution and an old earth. And the invention of true alphabets, when prehistory became history, is, strangely enough, about 4000 years old.
http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm
It's also entirely possible for someone to understand the science but believe for religious reasons that the earth does not go around the sun. It's just not rational or scientific because it is rejecting the answers presented by the scientific method and arbitrarily believing something else.
Well, if such a person was willing and able to defend their viewpoints, Id call that rational. Being rational doesn't mean blindly believing whatever someone tells you to believe without using your brain, whether its science or religion in question. Being rational means having a reason behind your beliefs, and being able to defend them logically.
And the invention of true alphabets, when prehistory became history, is, strangely enough, about 4000 years old.
Damnit, I meant to say 4000 BC, not 4000 years ago.
Or maybe even a run-on sentence. Or a sentence fragment. Or...
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
To fail at basic info like that, shows a disregard for scientific knowledge. And that is foundation of critical thought (together with some philosophy in it).
I would certainly consider doing mathematics critical thought, and mathematics is not founded on scientific knowledge. Nor is mathematics a science - a theorem in mathematics has a proof that is (or at least can be represented as) a set of symbolic manipulations that demonstrate that the given absolutely imply the conclusion. There is no possibility that future work will find the theorem to be false (if the mathematical system is consistent), unless the proof has an error in it, and since they can be mechanically verified, that basically doesn't happen after a proof has been around for a few months.
A theorem in science means that your model represents the data under all known conditions, possibly with some known exceptions. The theorem can be disproven (or, rather, demonstrated to be inapplicable in some domains) by finding a single counterexample. A mathematical proof demonstrates incontrovertibly that a counterexample doesn't exist.
I would expect you to counter by saying that mathematics requires scientific knowledge, but I disagree. Certainly what mathematics we do is impacted to some degree by what we know of the real world, but lots of mathematics is done that has no known relationship to reality. And in fact, sometimes that mathematics becomes the foundation of a new scientific model, even though the math was a "pure" pursuit for a long time. For an example, look up Group Theory.
I'm sorry, most men refuse, and should refuse, to go into teaching anything but university level so long as a mere accusation of any wrong doing with anyone under our magical age of majority will permanently disqualify them from anything but the most menial employment, land them in prison without a fair trial, brand them for life, likely lose them their family and possibly their life.
Fix that and suddenly you've got a much bigger applicant pool. Until then you have the same pool of potential employees, merit based pay or not.
Note, a fix doesn't have to include never examining complaints, but the situation as it stands now keeps a lot of intelligent and gifted men from ever having anything to do with any children but their own (this includes many other professions besides teaching) and frankly it's sad for our society.
Is that the Sidereal year, or the tropical year?
Do you know the surface area (in meters) of the Earth that is not covered by water? What percentage of the planet is composed of iron? How many cubic meters of oxygen exists in our atmosphere?
Yep and most geeks would have noticed the grammatical error because they know 47% is the wrong answer for the water question. However this geek is going to nitpick their damned servey and say that particular question is geography not science! Like the ability to spell correctly it's purely a function of memory.
/pimp_slap
Bullshit serveys such as this one do nothing except reinforce the notion that science is some sort of dictionary of unrelated factoids that one can pick and choose from to suit their needs. I think the survey authors need to update their stats and count themselves amoungst those who do not understand the meaning of the term "basic science".
OTOH the Earth orbit question is a "basic science" question since it requires basic knowledge of how our calendar is related to celestial mechanics. I have no idea about the other questions since I didn't RTFA.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Those who do not study a foreign language will always have worse grammar because it's easier to understand the purpose of grammar when comparing two languages together. Without a reference point native speakers will not have the intuition to check their sentences. I learned a lot more about English in my Spanish class than anywhere else.
"I only speak the truth"
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Hm, I disagree. Science does not start from evidence. It begins from the irrational, from the formation of the models and language used to describe an observer's sensations. Evidence is used only in a model's falsification, made possible by science's crucial premise--the existence of a predictive, deterministic model. That is a belief, by the way, not something that can be proven (neglecting omniscience).
So it's not that she's discarding evidence or reason. She just may not share the same basic beliefs. Neither side is provably correct; moreover, that foundation confines both your knowledge and hers.
That said, without some of us believing in predictability, I wouldn't have a job! ;-)
Aaaaaagh!
"I only speak the truth"
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Asking people whether Intelligent Design is science is unlikely to get you meaningful data about their general scientific abilities. There's too much hulabaloo surrounding it currently; people might answer "yes" simply out of perceived identity or the desire to belong to a group; and they might answer "no" for the exact same reason. Worse, the question-makers are also human and as such vulnerable to let their own emotions lead them in how to pose the question - "Do you believe in Intelligent Design?" vs. "Do you believe that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory?", for example.
In order to test for general scientific knowledge it would make much more sense to ask something no one is likely to passionate about, such as "Do rockets need to keep their engines running in space to keep on going?" (no) or "Why is it warmer at the equator than at poles?" (because sunlight arrives at an angle near poles and thus gets spread over larger area).
The most merciful quality of human mind is its inability to correlate its contents, quoth Lovecraft. Cognitive dissonance should always be accounted for when doing this kind of study, and the topic likely to cause large amount of it avoided. And Intelligent Design happens to be just such an issue.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I disagree...there are definitely factoids that demonstrate knowledge of science.
For example, I would say the following questions all demonstrate basic scientific knowledge rather than rote fact memorization:
At what temperature, in Celsius, does water freeze?
What's the mass of a cubic centimeter of water?
What's the atomic number of hydrogen?
How long does it take the earth to revolve around the sun? (from the article)
In all of these cases, the answer may be a number and a unit, but it's also the basis for each of those units, so knowing the number shows that you understand the unit of measurement.
The problem I have with the percent of the earth covered in water is that it's not a core science question and is arguably more of a geography question that a science question. They needed to pick questions that require standard scientific knowledge rather than having memorized a random fact.
percent of land covered in water is a totally different question than how much of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean. Especially if you are asking an exact percent.
70 percent ocean.
Antartica- covered by ice a mile thick 3 percent of total area of earth.
so totally covered by water. changes the number..
or if ice doesnt count.. why count the artic ocean (for now)
moves the number below 70 percent.
And it the question isnt asked the right way some people mught just consider lakes and streams and give a lowball guess for an ambigious question.
Oh.. and these questions without an incentive to answer them right will get screwballs who wont even bother. Put $100 in someones face, and ask them within 8% what percent of the earth.. and thet number goes way up.
You fail it. There are four known states: Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma.
Of the four, plasma is by far the most important and prevalent. Most of everything not on the Earth is a plasma.
I know you were just kidding around, but before you attempt to make fun of other people and their ignorance of basic science, you should check that you also aren't grossly deficient in that area.
I remember in middle school they didn't have a history teacher for us, so the science teacher was forced to teach it instead.
He usually would pick some random topics and have us do reports on them, but I wouldn't call that teaching. At least he had us reenact a play of the Irish Potato Famine.
So when people whine about 'throwing money' I can't help but think if teacher salaries were higher maybe they'd have an easier time filling the positions, and the competition for those positions would be greater. I love how CEO bonuses are great incentives but teacher salaries are a waste of money.
"I only speak the truth"
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Well, if such a person was willing and able to defend their viewpoints, Id[sic] call that rational.
How can ignoring the evidence as determined by the scientific method be rational?
Being rational doesn't mean blindly believing whatever someone tells you to believe without using your brain, whether its science or religion in question.
The scientific method is not to read what other people have come up with and believe them. It is to look at all the evidence and peer reviewed experiments to date and, if you think it useful, to create a new hypothesis and perform your own experiments.
Being rational means having a reason behind your beliefs, and being able to defend them logically.
I disagree. Being rational means forming your beliefs based upon the evidence and using reason. Anyone can use logic and evidence to try to defend any arbitrary belief. Brilliant people have irrational beliefs and can be quite good at defending those beliefs both to themselves and others. That's why decisions made via a formal process, such as the scientific method is a reasoned method of making decisions. Reason has to be part of the formation of the belief, not just defending it.
Okay, let's turn this around then: prove that people and dinosaurs DID exist together. Wait, you don't have any proof? Hrrrmm...well you know what that means moron? As far as science is concerned (because remember that scientific knowledge is sheerly based on what we can observe and measure), humans and dinosaurs never existed together.
What does magenta look like? Its always transparent to me.
Scientifically accepted does not always equal truth, but we can safely regard a scientific theory as truth when we have enough evidence to demonstrate the probability of that theory being wrong is close to zero.
Prediction and falsifiability are not the same thing, although they're linked. Even if intermediates had not turned up, it wouldn't have falsified evolution.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Erm...science actually does usually start from evidence, obviously you have no clue about the scientific method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Method#Elements_of_scientific_method
The essentials of the Scientific method are very simple:
1. You see something and you desire to have an explanation for it.
2. You come up with a hypothesis based on your observations.
3. Based on your hypothesis, you come up with a test that could prove or disprove your theory.
4. You test #3.
No where in there do people make "wild leaps of faith"; usually it is the news media that presents a wild theory as fact, rather than a potential explanation for what we observe.
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.
If you assume everyone has roughly the same amount of education and had a random chance of knowing any one of these three facts then 14.7% (.53*.59*.47) would have 'randomly' known the answer to all three without really being any more educated than the next guy. So since the actual number is only 6% higher (and theoretically it could be as high as 47%) it means that knowing the answer to one question doesn't necessarily mean you have a much better chance of getting the next question right.
So basically very few people have a well rounded education that has prepared them to answer those questions. Without going into the math too much around 10% of the population could be expected to get all similarly difficult questions right while the rest of the population would have no better chance than the next guy.
I, for one, will welcome our new idiot overlords ... wait a minute ...
This is what I don't get. All you Creationists are so ready to trust the math and physics behind the car you drive, the computer you use to surf the web, the house you live in, the products and services you use, but when the same math and physics are telling you "no, the world is slightly older than 7,000 years" you object. And you're shocked that others don't understand your objections. Baffling.
Eh?
I agreed with every single point in your post until I read this.
>>teachers paid based on merit
Sorry, but more often that not the teachers are underpaid and overworked. Almost every teach I have met in my lifetime, my own, my kids, and my friends who are teachers, has been a truly dedicated person who gets a kick out of seeing kids learn.
The problems in American Schools are for the most part not the teachers. But rather funding, politics, and administrative bullshit.
Truth.
Not that there aren't bad teachers. But there are 100 great ones for every 1 bad.
Huh?
What can you expect from a country who more than half of the population thinks that someone who says 'nukular' is well-informed enogh to to be put in charge of the big red button and to run the country for 2 terms?
A plasma is an ionized gas. It is still debated whether or not it should be considered a separate state of matter (although, the trend is to consider it separate).
Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan all straddle the border between Europe and Asia. Technically, they are in both continents.
Aruba is Dutch. The Cayman Islands are British. There is a list here if you need more examples.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
> > How many states are there?
> Three: Solid, Liquid, Gas.
How on Earth could you forget plasma or Bose-Einstein condensate!?
Much less all the other states ...
ok let's start with simpler things.
How many states are there?
Three: Solid, Liquid, Gas.
What, no love for plasma?
Sure she is. It's simply that she's accepting the Bible/Koran/whatever as evidence, so her model of reality must contain explanations for any perceived conflict between that and other evidence. She's not discarding evidence, she's simply making mental contortions trying to fit it all into a consistent whole. Of course such contortions appear pretty retarded to anyone who doesn't accept her holy book as evidence, but they aren't in princple different from those of someone trying to wrap his mind around Quantum Mechanics or the Theory of Relativity and integrate them to his worldview, just misguided.
None of this makes the assertion that dinosaurs and humans coexisted any less unlikely, of course. It simply means that if one accepts it as a fact for any reason, then claiming that the rate of radioactive decay varies is, in fact, scientific: it's an attempt of fitting all known facts into a model of the world. She's starting from evidence (some harebrained interpretation of the Bible, in her case) and forming theories, thus demonstrating the time-honoured principle of "garbage in, garbage out".
However, worthless as such theories might be for the field they were supposed to cover, they nevertheless give a fascinating insight into the workings of human mind, and how pre-existing knowledge guides the integration of new knowledge into the whole, and especially how the process can go horribly wrong when said pre-existing knowledge is bad. That's certainly something AI researchers should examine very closely.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Teachers are not "promoted" to Principal-status; In every state that I know of, the is a separate (and often very complicated) licensing process to become an administrator.
Math and science people can be paid a heckuva lot more in industry/research than in teaching. This is probably the biggest draw away from teaching. With my higher degrees, I know I'd be earning at least twice my current teaching salary if I just switched into industry. I've actually been turned down for teaching jobs because the extra degrees make me an expensive hire (i.e., they're required to pay me more because of extra education).
By the way, just because someone is brilliant in biochemistry, doesn't mean that they can teach it to someone else. You really don't want the "those who can't, teach" kinds of people in the classroom anyway.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
Let me retort in kind with another famous author's quote.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
"Do you want the bad news first or the good news? The good news is that about 80% of Americans think science knowledge is 'very important' to our future. The bad news is most of those people think it's up to someone else to get knowledgeable. Only 15% actually know how much of the planet is covered in water (47% if you accept a rough approximation of the exact number) and over 40% think dinosaurs and humans cavorted together like in some sort of 'Land Of The Lost' episode. What to do? Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense. Yes, it will enrage the teachers' union, but it might inspire better people to go into science teaching. It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."
WTF! How does the percentage of the Earth's surface covered with water rank as an important scientific fact? And dinosaurs? Give me a break. Last I checked, most people don't use dinosaurs or sail around on the ocean very often, so these little tidbits of geography and history are not retained.
Ask them questions about things that they use everyday: Why do we have seasons? What is electricity? How is energy generated form combustion?
I will admit that people should be on top of the definition of a year. But it's hard to be scientific when a half of the country is trying to ram Intelligent Design and God down your throat and the other half can't string coherent thoughts together because they are busy texting their friends about Britney Spears' panties.
The basic fact that we've never seen macro-evolution actually occur allows the idea that God could have created the Earth 6000 years ago to still stand. Long jump, I realize. Even the basic idea of macro-evolution actually is defeated in scientific method, due to the fact that it can't be recreated, and has never been observed directly.
These "basic facts" are only "facts" to those who "disbelieve" the mountains of evidence though.
In *reality*, macroevolution has (of course) been observed and recreated many, many times. Humans who live through millions of generations of bacteria can and do observe macroevolution in bacteria. Observing macroevolution in animals where we live only through 2 or 3 generations of their life cycle is obviously more difficult, yet we have adaptive radiation of the drosophilid flies in Hawaii as more examples of that.
So you fail.
No, they assumed that moderately-to-fabulously well-to-do white men would retain some minimal ability to reason. "The Masses" scared the shit out of most of them.
Not only that, but they didn't even expect the landed white men to be smart and learned enough to vote for those in higher offices whose work was more abstracted from their daily experience. Senators were to be chosen by state legislatures, and the President was to be chosen by local people elected specifically for that purpose, as it is ridiculous to expect the candidates to effectively campaign to an entire nation and equally ridiculous to expect any significant portion of the general population to be remotely qualified to judge a candidate for that position.
Oh, OK, so you already knew that. I leave the above for the sake of those who don't.
Democracy on a scale as large as the US blows. We need more republicanism (small-R, not the party).
Off the top of my head, I don't know the answers to any of those questions. Does that matter?
I do understand the questions, and I know how to find the answers to the questions, I've just not committed those facts to memory. I agree with the premise (science education sucks) but not with how they "proved" it (by asking people to recall facts.) What I expect people to have is the ability to think critically and hopefully also an understanding of the scientific method.
I think the real story here is that the people administering this study apparently completely fail at science.
>How many states are there?
Do you mean US states? Since a later question specifically mentions the US, this isn't a certainty. However, if you did in fact refer to US states, the answer is fifty.
>How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
Again, you do not state that this refers to the US government, and as a later question does not leave this as an assumption to make, it is uncertain. Once again, I am forced to either not answer or to make an unwarranted assumption. However, operating under that assumption, the answer is three: legislative, judicial, and executive.
>How many stripes and stars are on the USA flag?
These are two different numbers. There are fifty stars, but only thirteen stripes (at the time of this post being written).
>Name 3 countries in europe.
"Europe" should be capitalised. ÄOEeskà Republika, Deutschland, and Italia.
>Name 3 countries in Asia.
China, South Korea, and Vietnam.
>Name 3 countries in south america.
What is your problem with capitalising the names of continents? Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil, though.
>Name 3 countries in north america.
Canada, United States, Cuba.
>Explain how you can calculate your approximate destination time from your speed and distance.
d=rt
~~~
There, have I passed your little test? Why wouldn't you ask for three countries in Africa (Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa would be my own answers for that, as it happens).
>honestly, I wish Obama had the balls to call out and demand that all truancy laws be reinstated
No. No, no, no, no, NO! All truancy laws do is force people who have no interest in formal schooling (which, by the way, is not the only, or in most cases even optimal, way to learn) to attend, which causes problems for those who truly want to attend.
Sure. That would mean raising taxes or something.
Ha! Just picked this up to re-read yesterday.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"1. There is a shortage of science teachers. It is always hardest for the the schools to recruit science and math teachers."
Depends upon your definition of shortage. Lots of districts say they have a shortage but still manage to teach the courses....
In any case, they don't really TRY to recruit teachers. In order to teach (with an MS), I would need to take a 15 month "alternative route" program. And pay for it. And be unable to work during that time.
Why is it that I can teach college levels courses with a degree but need extensive training to teach HS? Considering the turnover rate, they would be better off lowering the standards and weeding them out on the job.
"The future of science education in America is bleak my friends (and foes.)"
True.
Is it an American translation? I see Zs all over the place.
You just got troll'd!
The Bush merit based award was a sick joke even given the difficulty of measuring merit in the first place. All I really know of it was from PBS, where they interviewed a teacher that turned up to collect her award and $2. That's not $2 extra per week, month or year but a one off award of $2. A bit of paper saying "good job" and nothing else is not insulting, but saying "you deserve $2 extra for your good work" is.
...and continuing with out continent theme...
Name 3 countries in Australia.
Name 3 countries in Antarctica.
Why? Because it's easier than funding the system properly, you still get to say you did something for the children and you get to blame any bad outcomes on individual teachers.
It is of course a trick, just like the "ebonics" stupidity in California a few years ago when it was found it would take a lot of work to actually give those kids a decent education in english and so there was a suggestion of a cheap way out.
Never trust a mathematician when it comes to science! The problem with mathematicians (especially pure ones, who deal with algebra or analysis - mathematicians don't consider statistics "real" math) is that they are so used to the requirement of rigorous proof that they can easily justify any physical belief to themselves under the theory that the converse can't be proven because we don't have a strict set of axioms backing it up.
Seriously, these guys can be nuts - Serge Lang (the prolific author of many of the most widely used upper level math texts in existence) argued quite strenuously on many occasions that HIV did not necessarily cause AIDS, but that they were merely somewhat correlated. And the guy was no idiot - he was a mathematical genius, but a lifetime of rigor can make people forget that outside of their bubble world, overwhelming evidence should be enough to accept a fact, and you can't insist upon proof when it's impossible to have it.
I blame the discovery channel.
Only tonight I watched a show about technology in future weapons. The "scientist" being questioned said that they had created radiation detectors for check points but they kept being set off by trucks full of kitty litter, which, he stressed, is not nuclear radiation.
Well what the fuck is it then ?
Also, on another show, the narrator described astronomers as "policing the skies" with regard to super novae. What they gonna do, arrest those nasty gamma rays before they hit earth?
Ludicrous.
kdawson is an imbecile troll. Typical of a hopeless moron to think of everyone as stupid as she is.
When is Slashdot going to fire this useless piece of trash of an editor?
Well, it tries to, but it's more like it sees "conut" and thinks the programmer probably meant "wildebeest".
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
... that he was writing non-fiction?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just think how many times Macguyver was saved by his knowledge of the solar system...
When it snows, the amount of the earth covered in water will increase quite a lot. It's frozen water, but um, they didn't specify.
I'm in Texas and the religious types here when I was growing up with take after you with "spare the rod spoil the child" in a heartbeat while the liberal dr. spocky types were all "that only teaches the child that violence is the answer".
I grew up in Florida and though there were "spare the rod spoil the child" religious types there were also those for whom physical punishment teaches violence is justified.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
When someone says "map of the Earth" to me, I immediately think of a globe and even times I spent spinning globes around under my hand. If you look at the side of the globe with the Pacific on it just right then all you see is a big expanse of water with a lot of tiny islands and some big shorelines scattered around the edges. Even If I stare at the middle of Asia, I really can't do "land with a bit of water around the edges" as impressively. I can't deduce "70%" from that with any speed or reliability but "considerably more than 50%" is quick with nothing more than eyeballs.
America's been behind the rest of the world in education for quite a while. I thought No Child Left Behind was supposed to fix this.
No Child Left Behind was not meant to fix the educational system in the US, it was meant to boost rote memory test scores. It's also a backdoor to privatizing education.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Well then lets simplify this a bit. The article in question is about American scientific literacy. At least on paper, The US is a technologically advanced Western nation. If we expect the US to stay that way indefinitely then what is the "acceptable minimum of knowledge"? I imagine it would have to be quite high since we expect to draw our future engineering students and applied scientists from our public and private school systems are turning out. Concomitant with that, one would also expect broad competence in mathematics. Perhaps for the US, a working knowledge of three body gravitational problems may be setting the bar a bit high but I hope like hell it goes beyond "The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west." It isn't as though quite a few of our engineering students are "just visiting" from abroad as it is.
Agreed, teachers aren't where the problem is. Right now our elementaries have all been transformed into SAT prep test centers. Sure you may learn an odd thing or two in such places but that is strictly accidental. The main skill being imparted is "how to pass the State test". What Shrubba-Dubya wanted to do was reduce education down to some "metrics" from which we could have "accountability" from schools and teachers but there is no real consensus on what education in the country should be. What I am sure of is that even when "No Child is Left Behind" and gets by that test OK is that he is still going to look undereducated compared to a Japanese or German student.
Though I think you're a tad optimistic about teachers in general. That is a bell curve same as most any other such thing. Most are OK but NOT great. A few are inspirational beacons of learning and about as many regularly scar kids for life.
Plus it is in at least one way, a trap question
Sort of like the kind that are often placed on standardized tests to trip up the average kids and produce a smoother Bell curve in the results. Critical reasoning is part of scientific investigation, so from that standpoint the question was not a trap, but rather just another form of test.
In this case it is a false statement of fact, as magenta is in fact, not my favorite color.
That's just your opinion of what your favorite color is. You might be wrong. I hypothesize magenta is your favorite color and we should subject you to a battery of tests where you rate how positively you feel about pictures of various objects in different colors and see if your answers correlate with magenta. Then we can publish the numbers and let some other people review it and see if the experiments are repeatable.
...
It's funny because it hurts.
Yes, it's exactly correct considering we're talking about only one significant figure. In this case there are only 9 other (exactly wrong) answers: 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 80%, 90%, 100%. Of course anyone with any sense at all could discard one of those -- 100% -- I would imagine.
You must have missed this while you were getting your doctorate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
What kind of funding do you think we could get for this study? I'm feeling like my favorite color might change if I am on different continents, so we will need to repeat the tests in various cities around the world.
I agree with the premise (science education sucks) but not with how they "proved" it (by asking people to recall facts.) What I expect people to have is the ability to think critically and hopefully also an understanding of the scientific method.
Every argument has assumptions. Given invalid assumptions, you can make a completely correct and logical argument that leads to utter nonsense. If you can't call on a background of factual knowledge then you don't have a prayer of spotting the invalid assumptions that folks will try to foist on you. Obviously you can't know everything, but the more facts you do know, the better off you'll be. You can't simply depend on Wikipedia to fill in facts as you need them, anymore then you can speak French simply by carrying around a French Grammar and a French dictionary.
The number of questions you answer correctly determines the weight of your vote. Question difficulty varies widely. (math from 1+1 to differential equations, reading from "see spot run" to corporate law, etc.)
It's time we got past the idea that a test is unfair to any particular group. To suggest unfairness is to suggest that a particular group is stupid. Not that it matters of course; all people should want our leaders chosen by the smartest voters.
In a former life as a teacher, I went to the headmaster and said that I wanted to teach the grade 10 general science course differently.
I wanted to walk in the first day and talk about 4 elements, earth, air, fire and water. Then for a day show how this explains everything.
I wanted to teach about caloric and phlogiston and luminiferous ether, and with each show the explaining power they had, then the problems they ran into.
Ptolomaic astronomy with circles and epicyccles and eccentrics.
Geology would be fun, especially the bits with continental drift and catastrophism vs uniformism.
The goal, I explained to my head: Teach that science is a process, and not a body of knowledge.
Long silence.
"That is a very dangerous idea."
I don't work there anymore.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Raising pay doesn't make teachers suddenly perform well. We'd just pay more for the same shitty results.
Somebody worth $75k won't tolerate the hostile workplace that is school. School is the only place outside of law enforcement where you have to face daily abuse. Law enforcement at least has the legal right to do something about the abuse; schools do not.
It's kind of unreasonable to expect regular people, who are lucky to make $35k, to want to pay more than that for babysitters.
The horrible failing is that states are allowed to set low standards. They are allowed to choose crappy tests.
Prior to NCLB, there was nothing to stop a teacher from spending most of his time rambling about his favorite hobby. Nobody could prove that learning didn't happen in his class. At best, every teacher taught their own private unapproved version of the curriculum. Next year's teacher would not be able to rely on anything having been learned this year.
To fix NCLB, we need to mandate specific test content and scoring standards. It was foolish to assume that states would not subvert NCLB when given power to decide the test content and standards.
You can't pay teachers out of the capital expenses budget, the facilities budget, etc.
As with any budget that is part of a larger budget managed by somebody else, "use it or lose it" applies. You might even get in trouble for not spending enough, because "use it or lose it" applies to the budgets above you as well.
Obviously, any moron can count ribs. Despite this, I knew a fundie who refused to believe that men and women have the same number of ribs. WTF!!!!!
That'd be a huge culture change.
Throw in the drinking age as well, with the driver's license a year later.
I guess bound it a tad, perhaps using age 14 and age 24. :-)
Go directly to math class. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
The chance of severe interference affecting the average (mean, median, or mode) approaches zero, not 100%.
The more students you have, the less the outliers matter.
Suppose your students do a horrible job on standard tests. Suppose that students with other teachers do even worse, comparing similar demographics.
I'd say that makes you a good teacher. Your students are less bad that would be expected, so clearly you deserve to be rewarded.
BTW, the students need to sleep. Keeping their eyes open during class won't really make them able to learn. The problem is after-school jobs, excess homework (remember that they have other teachers), the social need for a morning grooming routine, and an idiotic policy of having school start long before most people would naturally wake up.
Bah! You book-learned college boys think you can prove anything with fancy-pants statistics.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hear hear.
I for one have followed that strategy my whole life. I have made it my aim to never stay in a job longer than it takes to get bored. If I'm not learning, I get bored and drift away. OK, that means I never progress politically within a field, but I would rather have the knowledge than the power. That's probably why I use linux.
So if you want to work out how much turf you need to cover a circular patch of lawn, NOT knowing a reasonable approximation of Pi is OK ? You have to go find out what Pi is, how to apply it to the problem etc. Facts are only facts because they have been scientifically proven. Millionaire is trivia not calculation. Any fact you already have shortens the time needed to perform any calculation. You know that % means fractions of a hundred. If you didn't and were asked to put 40% of something somewhere, then how much should be left over ? Facts are useful, period. Witness the idiot selling laptops on TV stating that "it has a 500 gigabit hard drive" - ignorant, and proud to be that way.
The simple fact is, the more you know, the more you can know. If you see the word paediatrics on a sign in a hospital, you have a good idea that it means something to do with children, that is if you already know about paedophiles, or paediatricians. You can extrapolate from what you know to discover what you don't (science). If you choose not to know basic things, you are choosing complete ignorance, so expect to be treated that way.
Factoid is a stupid term, used by stupid people.
I have been trying to get a good friend of mine to try out linux. He doesn't know much about computers, but does a lot of selling on ebay etc. His main and first question was "how big is it ?" WTF ? What does that mean ? How big is the install disk, or how much disk space does it take up or what ? It turns out that Vista takes a few gig of disk space, so when I said that you can get a reasonably useful linux install in less than 50 MB he was astounded. But where the hell did his original question come from ? What kind of metric is that ? It has nothing to do with the merits of an operating system AFAIK.
I beg to differ. We do have quite some evidence. The human evolution can be traced back to about 3 million years where the Australopithecine lived. Only after that the Homo genus appeared and its remains could be found. There might still be some links missing and you could give or take a million years due to undiscovered specimens for the first appearance of the Homo genus. But the overall picture is consistent and to assume there have been human ancestors 65 millions back in time together with the dinosaurs is just absurd.
We have a consistent picture of human evolution which starts 60 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct. Of course you might doubt the extinction but for that we have quite some good arguments, too. On the one hand how likely would it be that you find all kinds of skeletons only up to the point of extinction but not afterwards? Unless all remainung dinosaurs gathered together in a yet undiscovered spot on earth this cannot be explained plausibly. But that's not real evidence, granted. At the same time the dinosaurs stopped to exist we also see that remains of many species stopped to appear afterwards, leading to the assumption of global mass extinction. And last but not least an impact crater of a meteor dating back to the very time the assumed extinction took place has been found. All in all this picture is pretty consistent, too.
:w!q
Yes, that apparently includes a large part of the American populace. So be it, you cannot just pick and choose in science as you can with the Bible. You either go with logical conjecture based on evidence, or you make things up as you go. Mixing the two makes you fall in the latter camp.
"Dad! Dinosaurs died millions of years before humans lived."
and for "How long does it take the earth to go around the sun?" he says "a few years.. no wait, 1 year."
Go Canadian Education system.
The problem isn't necessarily the teachers. It's the parents! How can you base someones pay on merit when the child goes home to a television, Playstation, etc?
Parents need to be held accountable for their actions and the actions of their children. Almost like giving a report card to the parents and mandating that they go to class because their kids are failing.
Take for example some Asian countries. Many parents within those cultures instill in their children that getting anything lower than an "A" or "Top Grade" is dishonorable to the family. The culture is driven in such a way that all the children strive to learn and do better.
In the US the culture seems to be some sort of laissez-faire attitude that the kids need to be kids. Sort of like, "Let kids play and watch tv" but don't hold any responsibility for them not doing homework or being responsible. "That's the teachers fault that the kid didn't do their homework", and yet the student has parents that don't care. Then everyone goes and blames teachers for not teaching when in fact it's the parents that should be blamed.
Another interesting point is how will you "measure" a teachers performance? Would you "measure" public and private schools alike? With the educational system each State sets their own standards. Some States for example have set their standards one year ahead of all other states. e.g. All second grade standards need to be taught in first grade, etc. With that in mind how do you measure state to state? There is no national test! Then you also have private schools that are "exempt" from taking theses tests.
The problem is a home. Yes schools can be fixed, there can be better teachers, but honestly people need to start being better parents.
It's because you're a virgin, right?
In all seriousness, understanding the best way to go about sexually abusing another person comes naturally from understanding how people think and how social and sexual interactions work. If you don't know what behaviors, actions, and words are most humiliating to a person, or how to harm someone physically and psychologically, you are not only likely not very good at socializing (and don't realize it), but you're likely to harm someone in those ways by accident at some point.
Same goes for racial epithets. If you don't understand the finer points of racial epithets, how can you be sure you'll never accidentally insult an oversensitive Asian?
ResidntGeek
Just a note: Knowing how much of the planet is covered in water is *not* scientific literacy. That is trivia knowledge. If I need to know how much of the planet is covered in water (I'd guess 80%), I look it up, and decide if the definition matches my needs.
I think you hit it on the head. Information like "How much of our planet is covered by water?" isn't something most people outside of a basic Earth science class need to know to function in their daily lives. It's not something they need to know for work or to carry on a conversation with their peers.
With things like Google and internet capable cell phones becoming more mainstream, you're going to find most people commit less information they don't need in their every day lives to memory in favor of "If I need to know, I'll look it up."
This has nothing to do with God, it is all about money and power. Guess who has it, not the parents.
What a gigantic load of crap. Nothing get's one more politically motivated and involved than having kids - nothing. In between your anti-government rants, did it ever occur to you that there is a reason why those faux "think of the children" tactics work so well?
You are completely correct in that. There is indeed a difference between knowledge (data) and reasoning. However, chances are that if you haven't got a clue whatsoever about numbers and orders of magnitude, that you won't reason very much either.
Most of the time when I read something related to physics, I like to do a rough calculation in my head to see if what is stated seems logical to me. Like how high the ocean level will rise when so many tons of ice melts on Antarctica, what efficiency can be reached with some new kind of solar cell (and whether this is spectacular or not), how long it would take an airliner to fly around the world, etc.
Merit pay wont matter or will make matters worse.
NCLB. The federal government is only measuring success, and rewarding it, for reading and math scores. This means that the schools will not give teachers enough time to adequately cover science and social studies. In Michigan that state does not even give schools adequate tests for measuring any scientific knowledge.
I'm on the fence here. While I agree a lot of people couldn't pass your 'test' every question but the last is strictly memorization just as the article's test is. Schools tend to focus heavily on memorization and gloss over actual understanding. This explains why many people feel math is hard and physics is a brick wall. What you memorize is minimal compared to your ability to understand the problem. I've taken plenty of math/physics tests that were basically one or two formulas applied over and over again in slightly different ways. Yet the classes often struggle with even the basics.
I could google and answer every question posed in well under 30 seconds. In fact, I can google almost any factual question that quickly. Try that with a 'process' question and it's not so easy. You need to understand to answer.
In the end though, i agree with you on the failure of our schools. Teachers unions and the lunacy of standardized testing / "no kid left behind" are crippling us. The underlying, fundamental problem though is the parents. When a child feels it's doesn't matter if they fail, that is the parent's fault. Everyone has an excuse, everyone is special, everyone is 'differently abled' or has ADD/ADHD. Parents will argue with a teacher over a grade instead of helping their kid study more.
When will anyone take responsibility for their actions?
You hit on one of my favorite pet peeves though - you can't graduate from high school in germany, france, japan, etc if you don't learn english *in addition* to your primary language...but you can graduate from high school IN THE UNITED STATES WITHOUT SPEAKING ANY ENGLISH, much less being able to read/write it.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
And if you accept that, then the scientific method is just as worthless as if you regularly deny the visual evidence of 6 billion people the world over when it comes to the color of the grass and the sky.
While the color of the grass and sky are, on average, green and blue, I disagree with there being 6 billion people over the world. Clearly, there is only myself. The rest are only a nightmare.
Scientific method is the detailed analysis of my nightmare. It doesn't really apply to reality.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
I do agree with most of your post. However, some points seem a bit off.
How many states are there?
Geo-political question
How many MAJOR branches of the government are there and name them.
Civics question
How many stripes and stars are on the USA flag?
Civics question
Name 3 countries in europe.
Geo-political question
Name 3 countries in Asia.
Geo-political question
Name 3 countries in south america.
Geo-political question
Name 3 countries in north america.
Geo-political question
Explain how you can calculate your approximate destination time from your speed and distance.
Math question. The answer is that you can't. You can only calculate the approximate travel time without a start time.
The majority of your questions are political in nature. While the answers might be of scientific interest to a sociologist, they don't test scientific literacy very well. However, the gist of your message is about illiteracy in general, not scientific illiteracy.
...cant understand why Americans cant speak more than 1 language
I can find plenty of historical causes for this. The main cause would seem, to me, to be national pride and the subjugation of anyone that doesn't speak English. However, on a practical level, I'd say it's because many Americans don't interact with people that speak a different language. America is a large, culturally isolated country. It has a history of dumping the old ways (culture, language, etc) in favor of the new.
This is changing. By choice, my oldest daughter is trying to learn Spanish and Japanese. She has friends whose primary language is Spanish and she has an interest in Japanese animation. My nephew is learning Chinese in high school. His interest is in business.
...demand that all truancy laws be reinstated
Which truancy laws were revoked? Unless I register as a Home Schooler, I get fined for not sending my kids to school. If they miss too much school, the state will take them away from me. If I register as a Home Schooler, then they must pass regular, standardized tests. As for why someone would choose to home school their kids, that is really a different discussion. However, I'd say it's because public school is far more interested in political indoctrination and less interested in providing a basic education.
3 of the highschools around here will give you a diploma even if you cant read.
The only solution I can find is for more people to become politically involved. Unfortunately, most people don't have the time that would require. On top of that, it can seem like an impossible task when you are alone against the system.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Poor, naive people who did Economics 101 but never made it to Economics 102.
"Merit" is a very easy word to say, but a very hard concept to pin down. When pay raises are on the line, you need an objective way to tell who are the good teachers and who aren't. As soon as you do that, you instantly provide a way for bad teachers to game the system.
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So I write a detailed comment on what ails US science education/literacy...which contained a lot of uncomfortable truths about US schooling and politics...and it gets REMOVED?? Because I politely made some points drawn FROM the academic research (including from that IN the US) about substantial shortfalls in US academe & science education?
Interesting. Everything I wrote is well substantiated in the research literature on science education....but obviously some were offended. Well, the literature IS offensive. And that it is ignored by your policymakers should also be seen to be offensive....by YOU. And it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the literature....I'm one of the more senior science education academics in Canada and I present & publish my research in the US all of the time.
Well, until you get over your pique and to grips with your schooling system being substantially underfunded and therefore deficient (at MANY levels) and start paying attention to what the rest of the world is doing (errr, not what you're doing) then your system will continue to stagnate....including with President Obama's education plan, which continues the past patterns.
If you can't handle some polite but hard truths about your issues, then there is little hope for improvement.
There are six states and a few territories (3 or 4 I think, maybe more, all except one (Northern Territory) rather small and insignificant).
I live in the big state to the west, over a million square kilometres of it, 12,000km of coastline, etc. etc.
Oooh, are you thinking of the United States of America or are you opening the question to every nation that has constituent states??
See, this is /. on the internet and people could respond who might live in other places, for example Australia (not to be mistaken for Austria) and we have a rather different situation and world view to what seems to be the case for the majority of USAnians...
Sorry, please forgive me, carry on...
PS, I'm not sure how you "travel at 85mpg 6 feet from the guy in front" since mpg is a measure of fuel economy... did you perhaps mean mph? A measure of speed?
tee hee, spellcheckers stuff up again.
PPS I hope I've not stuffed up or I'll look more of a fool than I really am! :(
Here downunder the people born here usually speak just one language, English (it's Australias sole official language), as that's all we need.
We share no borders with any other nation. The USA shares borders with at least two (Mexico and Canada), but in Europe or Asia, well, umm, there's lots of languages and lots of countries on the same continent there so it's probably quite natural to speak the language of the people your country invaded (or was invaded by) over the last 1000 years or so...
And I'm assuming (whoops!) that the poster is a citizen of the USA, and I could be quite wrong.
I agree that if you can't read, you should NOT be able to get out of the education system until you can. That *IS* a fucking embarrassment!!
Best post ever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do I believe that God literally told a man named Noah to build an ark and gather two of every kind of animal together, made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights, had the flood waters go above the tallest mountain, then had the entire human race (as well as every species of animal) repopulated from the survivors on board the Ark? No.
Do I think that there was likely some big flood a few thousand years back the account of which became the basis for the story of Noah's ark? Yes.
However, I've heard people who take the Bible (or in this case, the Torah) 100% literally try to "refute" fossil evidence by claiming that the Great Flood mixed up the layers and also tampered with the bones of the animals that died in such a way as to make them seem life fossils which were millions of years old.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Hell yes it is a strawman. I can look at the sky and see it isn't red(Most of the time - this far south we do tend to get the southern lights some evenings). Believing that scientists can accurately extrapolate 50+ million years into the past from a sample size that tops out ~100 years is another thing entirely.
Thanks for the update.
I don't say that I'm the brightest, and I might believe in God and all that, but I'm pretty sure we can't know what happened so long ago. For all we know, we could be some science experiment to determine life, the universe, and everything.... And 42 just doesn't answer it unless you know the question.
The above is not worth reading.
Well, that depends on what definitions you are using. If by "prediction" you mean the data set your theory explains, that is directly proportional to falsifiability.
Read the thread again. You pointed out that confirming instances of evolution have been observed.
The presence of these confirming observations does not falsify evolution (of course!)
The absence of such confirming observations would not falsify evolution
Falsifiability means identifying observations which, if they occurred, would disprove the theory. The only relevant predictions of a theory are predictions that something could not occur.
The confirming instances are relevant to a positivist view of science; they are not (strictly) relevant to a Popperian view of science because they say nothing about falsifiability. I think you've rather made my original point for me -- deciding what science is isn't as straightforward as many advocates of science think it is.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
24 hours.
Wrong. That was a trick question. Everyone know the sun revolves around the earth.
Like this.