Scientific and quantitative literacy: a comparative study between STEM and non-STEM undergraduates taking physics

Abstract

Student attitudes and beliefs in one subject area are known to affect how students learn in that subject, but how much of a crossover these attitudes have with other subjects and the associated effects are not well understood. This study aims to measure how students’ attitudes regarding numeracy affect their scientific literacy and whether students’ quantitative literacy skills correlate with their scientific reasoning skills. This study further investigates students’ scientific literacy skills, quantitative literacy skills and numeracy attitudes via quantitative assessments in introductory physics and astronomy survey courses. We selected students from courses that produced a sampling of students with diverse quantitative and scientific backgrounds. The results from this study suggest that quantitative literacy correlates with scientific literacy, but this correlation decreases as students advance in mathematical proficiency. Student attitudes regarding numeracy were not found to be correlated with scientific literacy. Results also suggest that improving students’ scientific literacy skills within the non-STEM science classroom also requires improving quantitative literacy skills.