Civic Science Literacy in the United States

Yesterday I got the latest issue of Science News, in which the editorial discussed science in politics. Coincidentally, I also went to a talk by Jon Miller, from Michigan State University titled, “Scientific Literacy and Citizenship in the 21st Century.” His main thesis was that many of our most pressing social and political issues are at their core scientific and that this will only increase as time passes. Unfortunately, most people do not have even a basic understanding of science and as such, can not even understand enough of the issue to intelligently discuss them let alone make policy decisions about them.
Many people have the idea that knowing the science is not required because common sense will allow figuring out enough to adequately make decisions. While that was true a hundred years ago, that is far from reality today. The issues are simply too broad scale and complex for standard common sense to work. Quite simply, if you can’t even understand the arguments, you can’t decide what to believe using rational thought.
His talk had good news and bad news. The good news is that the United States was second only to Sweden in the number of its citizenry that could pass a basic science test. The bad news is that we only rate 25% (for comparison, Sweden was just over 35% and the EU averaged only 15%. We have also improved in the last twenty years as we only rated 10% in 1988. However, with the issues facing us now, having only 1 in 4 of the population able to even begin to understand them is a serious danger to democracy.
So what brought our score down below Sweden? The rank of the US in understanding evolution is 33 out of 34 countries with only 40% accepting evolution, ahead of only Turkey. Iceland was number one with over 80% of their populace conversant in basic evolutionary concepts. The factor most strongly correlated with the rejection of evolution was religious fundamentalism, which actually strongly negatively correlated with science literacy of any kind.
The causes for these scores were seen to lie in two factors: our high schools and our universities. Our high schools rate virtually last in the world. He hypothesized that this was due to the fact that we are the only country to fund our schools using property taxes, which woefully underfunds our public schools. However, this is counterbalanced by our universities, which rate among the best. We are also the only country that requires virtually all college students to take a year of a core set of general education courses which include introductory science courses in addition to the three years required for their major. Apparently, in other countries, students only take the courses relating to their major. Thus, those not in the sciences never need take a science class. Unfortunately, only 28% have a college degree, which is behind many other countries.
He and his colleagues correlated several factors that affected science literacy. Despite what many people seem to think, gender was not a factor and he rightfully disparages the prevalent attitude that girls can’t do math and science. In fact, considering that women now outnumber men in colleges by over 6% and are increasing their dominance in colleges, young women are more likely than men to be scientifically literate.
The single biggest factor (with a correlation of .78) was having had the basic science courses in college. Because of this large effect, he advocated gearing these courses to increasing their effectiveness in enhancing adult continuing education. Other often discussed effects were also evaluated, including internet use with a positive correlation of .39. Religious fundamentalism had the worst affect, with a negative correlation of .2. Interestingly, TV had no effect either positive or negative.
As a case study, he specifically studied attitudes toward climate change. They were only able to account for 30% of the variance, but of that 30%, the overriding factor was political party. Republicans were likely to dismiss it, Democrats were more likely to think it was a serious concern. Of those that were concerned, they were able to account for most of the variance about who tried to do something about it, such as contacting their congressmen to talk about political issues. Being scientifically literate had a correlation of .41, but a bigger influence was seen by having children, with a correlation of .55. Climate change is an inherently long term issue. Apparently, having children causes people to give more consideration to things that affect their kids. Again, religious fundamentalism negatively correlated with concern about climate change. Of course, the majority of religious fundamentalists were Republican.
I’ll just finish this summary of his talk with two thoughts of his. “Civic scientific literacy provides a set of conceptual and practical tools…to make full use of the Internet and related information centers.” One good thing that Bush has done for the country is that “Political scientists no longer argue that is makes no difference who wins the elections.”