College Students Lack Scientific Literacy

An anonymous reader writes with news of research into the scientific literacy of college biology students. Earlier studies found that students tended to "rely on mainly informal reasoning derived from their personal experiences," so the researchers derived a new instructional framework that explicitly taught principle-based reasoning. While the number of students who used this method did increase, more than half continued to use informal reasoning, which the researchers say points to a flaw in the way biology is taught (PDF). "Most college-level instruction presents students with complicated narratives about the details of key processes (e.g., cellular respiration), but does not explicitly reinforce the use of key principles to connect those processes. Therefore, students are understandably occupied with memorizing details of processes without focusing on the principles that govern and connect the processes. ... As a result, students may leave an introductory biology course with the ability to recite the reactions in the Calvin cycle but still believing that plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere, that plants photosynthesize but do not respire, or that the mass of a decomposing organism will primarily return to the soil."

Re:Early Development

[Sonny Yatsen]

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Closing_the_talent_gap.aspx [mckinsey.com]

Noting: "Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ,” we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5juGFSx9LiPaur6eO1KJAypB2ImVQ?docId=CNG.5337504e8f65acf16c57d5cac3cfe339.1c1 [google.com]

From the Article: "The United States has fallen from top of the class to average in world education rankings, said a report Tuesday that warned of US economic losses from the trend. .... ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

Incidentally, the PISA Report on education on which the previous article is about uses a sampling of 15 year old students. It's not comparing our students with the cream of their crop. It's comparing our average students with their average students.

Most other countries are trying to make their education system more like Finland, South Korea and Singapore, not our's. Heck, even in the US, there are non-Asian parents who send their kids to Chinese school as an afterschool supplement because the math and science education offered there is often much better than what's offered in public schools.

Re:Logic Fail

[Attila Dimedici]

How does the existence of the Tea Party illustrate that people are missing basic logic tools? Unless you are saying that if people had basic logic tools the Tea Party would never have been necessary?
Or maybe you don't know what the basic point of the Tea Party is? The basic point is that the government cannot continue to spend more than it takes in indefinitely without a collapse at some point. Raising taxes does not solve the problem. Historically, the U.S. government has recieved about 18-19% of GDP in taxes (19% is the highest it has ever been), currently it is spending approximately 24% of GDP.