I am working on a piece about scientific literacy! This is for a course on writing about science.

I sent around this survey to gather a sense of what people in my generation know about science and what they thought about their core science classes.

Some of the responses are quite interesting. Here are a few quotes:

• “The lectures covered really interesting material, but too often the professors failed to make it interesting. Labs were excessively long and filled with lots of busy work.”
• “On one hand I think it is pretty important for people to understand what’s going on around them but on the other hand I think some people just don’t have the time to devote to understanding what is going on. But I think college kids should definitely know because they have a lot of free time. So I think that it is important for college students to but I wouldn’t expect like an adult to understand everything going on.”
• “The only think I think people need to know in terms of scientific literacy is that if they read something that politicians say or someone in power says that they should do, I feel like before they do anything about it, they need to learn about it.”
• “Yeah, the media has a big role and people can’t take what they hear from the media at first glance. Like when I said I like understanding everything around me, I go on Wikipedia and type in random stuff like constantly, when I hear about something in the news. The thing under my facebook says “life is a giant wikiquest” just because I spend like an hour on wikipedia every day.”

The piece will probably end up being about 3000 words. I’ll probably post it here at some point. Currently, I’m working on a second draft for next week. If you have any thoughts to contribute, I would be interested to read them!

Continue reading →