Yesterday, I briefly described my contribution at the STS Conference, but I'm more interested to highlight the terrific graduate student contributions from the education panel I moderated. Today we begin with the work of Megan Anderson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's a particularly interesting topic considering the discussion we had here last week on science literacy. Megan's focused on the way we interpret and evaluate science encountered in the news. She points out that traditionally research has looked at scientific and technological terms to evaluate public understanding. (Sound familiar?) In fact, our view of the relationship between science and society has probably been distorted by previous efforts to quantify what citizens 'know' based on such analyses. So how might we improve methodology? Megan suggests incorporating epistemic and social dimensions of scientific understanding into the evalution. In other words, we need to figure out when subjects are able to develop a general understanding of what they're reading or viewing instead of testing their ability to memorize a series of facts or dissect a topic. She's looking to solve some very real challenges and I'll be extremely interested to see where this leads. In the mean time, do readers have your own ideas toward improving assessment? It's a critically important consideration given recent events leave me very concerned about the state of scientific literacy in this country...
