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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."
Boards of Education are trying to teach how a magic man in the sky created everything. Reap what you sow.
That's funny. Wonder what the percentage of scientifically literate people who can identify a misplaced modifier is?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.
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
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.
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Well, that's the problem, isn't it. You can't correlate things that way. You can't say "Little Johnny is only getting Cs in English" and then declare his teacher sucks, any more than you could make the declaration that his teacher's fantastic if he's getting Bs. You don't look at a single student, you look at a body of students over time. If an English teacher consistently produces an above-average number of well-performing students, and this trend continues over a couple of years, then you can start making at least some sort of preliminary statistical statements.
When I was in grade 8, I had possibly the worst teacher of my entire life in Math. He was a disaster area. He'd do things like write on the chalkboard "Polynomial" followed by some rather oblique definition which, because he hadn't really taught the fundamentals to use, made no sense whatsoever. Over half of that class outright failed, and only a small handful of kids got C+s or better. I don't think anyone got an A. Apparently he had been doing this for years. Now, I don't think you have to be a statistician to come to the conclusion that this guy was continually turning out failing grades at a far higher rate than what one ought to expect, and that even those that passed were sitting at the mid-Cs with far more frequency.
The fact was that school administrators were basically hamstrung by the union. The union has fought performance evaluations for decades, has protected some genuinely awful teachers, simply because, despite all the high talk, teachers unions don't give a shit about students. Quite frankly the first act of political will needed is to bloody well hamstring the unions, force at least some sort of medium-term evaluation system that can accept that teachers won't always be at the top of their game, but that anyone who is consistently dropping the ball needs to be let go. Sometimes I think giving the crappy teachers a fat severance package if they go away quietly would be much better than letting them trash the learning of kids for years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Could that be because here there's more need for it?
At the bottom of the
My hypothesis about why programmers tend to be more exacting about grammar is because you have to be in programming. In natural languages, other people can usually figure out what you meant if you leave out a word or swap the placement of two words. In programming, if you misspell a variable, the program usually doesn't work.
It's not really nitpicking; the sentence was poorly constructed and because of this failed to communicate. I for one thought the sentence was saying that 47% of the earth is covered in water, as did the original poster.
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Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
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.
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