Abstract
Civic scientific literacy (CSL) is an important factor for the development of any country, and this is especially true for a country which is under development and at the same time pursues sustainability. In this article, we conduct the firstly systematic study of CSL in China based on survey data in 2013. Under the multi-dimension CSL framework and by using item response theory, we assess the CSL level in China, which can be fairly compared with that in U.S. and Europe (US-EU). The comparable survey results provided a number of implicational findings: for example, the status of CSL of China in 2013 would have ranked as middling and poor compared to the CSL results for the various US-EU countries in 1995 and 2005, respectively. Some group-based analyses were also conducted to show how people’s attitudes to the environment and socio-environmental behaviours correlate with the CSL-qualified rate in China. The empirical results provided by this study not only can serve as references for improving CSL in China or other emerging countries that also address the sustainability issues during development, but could also serve as indicators for future studies (e.g., in causational modelling).
Highlights
In a pair of recent works from 2007, for example, Roberts presented two visions offering somewhat different definitions of scientific literacy: Vision I is rooted in the products and processes of science, while Vision II involves the character of situations with a scientific component, including situations that students are likely to encounter as citizens [1,2]
Due to the use of a correct answering rate threshold’ (CART) to determine which respondents do/do not possess civic scientific literacy (CSL), the outcomes of these surveys cannot be compared with those from other countries because of result heterogeneity, even if the questionnaire was organized in a similar manner or the questions were identical
The study of CSL is a form of socio-scientific work that has continuously been conducted around the world over decades [72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80], and the results of CSL studies from China, the country with the largest population, should be highlighted and compared
Summary
The measures of civic scientific literacy (CSL) are plentiful and varied. An adopted measure usually connotes a different interpretation of and a divergent view of CSL than those connoted by other measures, and such distinctions may greatly affect the process of undertaking CSL surveys, as well as the degree to which the results of different surveys can be clearly understood and compared. The discussion and study of scientific literacy is a central concern in many areas of the social sciences, and scholars’ understanding of scientific literacy is continually being updated. In a pair of recent works from 2007, for example, Roberts presented two visions offering somewhat different definitions of scientific literacy: Vision I is rooted in the products and processes of science, while Vision II involves the character of situations with a scientific component, including situations that students are likely to encounter as citizens [1,2].
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