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College Students Lack Scientific Literacy
An anonymous reader writes with news of research into the scientific literacy of college biology students. Earlier studies found that students tended to "rely on mainly informal reasoning derived from their personal experiences," so the researchers derived a new instructional framework that explicitly taught principle-based reasoning. While the number of students who used this method did increase, more than half continued to use informal reasoning, which the researchers say points to a flaw in the way biology is taught (PDF). "Most college-level instruction presents students with complicated narratives about the details of key processes (e.g., cellular respiration), but does not explicitly reinforce the use of key principles to connect those processes. Therefore, students are understandably occupied with memorizing details of processes without focusing on the principles that govern and connect the processes. ... As a result, students may leave an introductory biology course with the ability to recite the reactions in the Calvin cycle but still believing that plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere, that plants photosynthesize but do not respire, or that the mass of a decomposing organism will primarily return to the soil."
How could this possibly work? Farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year, unless they're spreading an equal volume of human excrement on their fields they'd be farming in pit mines after a few decades. That doesn't even begin to address that the soil that plants actually grow in is only a matter of inches deep in many locations, or the fact that you can grow plants in water more efficiently than in soil. So yeah, I'd say we're missing some basic logic tools if biology majors can't think that one through.
As if the existence of "The Tea Party" and The Creation Museum were not evidence enough for you? Seriously, basic critical thinking skills have been scarce for some time, it's not just the students in freshman college biology courses. So it seems obvious then, that the problem is far more fundamental than how we teach science in high school No?