265 Geoscience Education IX: The Roles of Learning, Development and Science Literacy in the Earth Sciences

Wednesday, 12 October 2011
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Room 211AB

DEVELOPING A CONCEPT INVENTORY FOR IMPROVED SCIENCE LITERACY

Paper number: 265-8
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:15 PM – 3:30 PM

Authors

Abstract

In 2008, science instructors from five different disciplines and four California State University (CSU) campuses began a project to promote science literacy in general education science courses. This project has now contributed to the regional and national dialogue on science general education outcomes. We developed 12 learning outcomes that correspond to important concepts of understanding science, in contrast to the usual presentation of "the scientific method." With five science disciplines represented in our team, our 12 outcomes are intentionally constructed to avoid dependencies of specific content knowledge, and apply equally to the geosciences, the biosciences, and other science disciplines.

Since 2010, our work has been incorporated into CSU and University of California (UC) guidelines to assess transferability of science courses for general education courses. To assess course effectiveness in terms of science literacy, we constructed a Science Literacy Concept Inventory (SLCI) to measure conceptual understanding of science as a way of knowing and reasoning across the 12 outcomes. The SLCI not only allowed us to test conceptual reasoning, but the selection of incorrect distracters in the multiple choice items allowed us to study the misconceptions associated with each of the 12 concepts. We professors and our texts routinely teach the knowledge and applications of science but not conceptual understanding or evidence-based reasoning. Science literacy based on understanding of science as a way of knowing is multidimensional, teachable, assessable, and indispensable to a high quality education.