Toward Scientific Literacy for Nonscience Majors

Abstract

An educational goal we all share for nonscience majors is for them to graduate college with a degree of scientific literacy. What do we mean by scientific literacy? Certainly we mean a familiarity and comprehension regarding concepts that are particularly fundamental to understanding the workings of our physical and biological world, as debatable as the identity of those concepts may be. Many scientists would further argue that scientific literacy is equally about how we collect and evaluate information scientifically, and especially what we mean by scientific certainty. My personal view is that this component of scientific literacy may be more important than any single factual concept, yet we tend to delay or avoid its development since nonscience majors often have difficulty with these end stages of the scientific process-data analysis and scientific decision making. The difficulties students have are understandable since comprehension rests on some esoteric ideas that are traditionally explored in math and statistics classes, not the favorite of the majority of students. Nevertheless, I think we shortchange the student and undermine the goal of achieving science literacy if we defer learning about objective decision making for advanced science courses (which nonmajors seldom take). The trick is to include data analysis in our modeling of science processes without getting lost in the intricacies and subtleties of statistical analysis. This paper presents ideas for how to approximate statistical analysis and decision making by approximating 95% confidence intervals, and drawing conclusions about significance of difference based on visual comparisons of frequency distributions. The Challenge-From Documents on Science Reform