A Survey of High School Students’ Scientific Literacy Skills in Different Gender

Abstract

Scientific literacy skills are one of the skills required by the students nowadays, especially in biology. Students should master these skills in order to be able to apply scientific knowledge to solve problems related to science. The aim of this study was to investigate male and female senior high school students’ scientific literacy skills. The current study employed a survey method. The samples of the study consisted of the eleventh graders from three public senior high schools (SMAN) in Malang: SMAN 8 Malang, SMAN 7 Malang, and SMAN 1 Malang. The research data were analysed using an independent-samples t-test. The analysis result showed that there was a significant difference between male and female students’ scientific literacy skills. Female students tend to perform better in scientific literacy skills than male students (p = 0.002). Around 2.33% of the male students were on level 0, 23.26% on level 1, 51.16% on level 2, and 23.26% on level 3. On the other hand, 4.05 % of the female students were found on level 1, 56.76 % on level 2, and 39.19% on level 3. This condition suggests that an innovative learning to empower students’ scientific literacy skills needs to be introduced to biology learning.