In the United States today 14% of adults are illiterate, while 21% read below a fifth grade level, at the same time, 19% of the students who graduate high school cannot read. (U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy) Meanwhile todays schools do not teach students about the science they will need to know in their daily lives. Such as informing them how to make decisions related to their health, and issues in science they see on the news or read about in the paper. The book I have chosen to read “Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy” by Robert Hazen and James Trefil tries to analyze and solve these dilemmas. The purpose of this book is to try and get the reader to attain scientific literacy. To me this book
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The main scope of this book was on the natural sciences, with little emphasis on the social sciences. Some of the main focuses were Biology, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry. Both authors of this book are physical scientist. Thefil is a physicist while Hazen is a geophysicist. This factors into the idea of how several scientists believe that field of science is more important, as well as interesting. I also believe that they might have taken a physical science approach, since students tend to try and avoid physics due to all the math calculations involved. Students prefer life science classes more due to their nature approach and absence of math …show more content…
Scientific Literacy is a mix of several different concepts. It includes history and philosophy which help to allow you to understand the scientific issues of our time. If you can understand the scientific issues you read or hear about then you are considered to be scientifically literate. Literacy is a fundamental concept that is conflicted with the simple view of reading and writing, which has a large impact on literacy instruction in schools, and, we believe, is widely assumed in science education. There are suggestions for how scientific literacy could be viewed differently if the fundamental sense of literacy was taken more seriously. This would be accomplished by teachers exploring educational implications by including literacy in its fundamental sense into the science classroom. “Every citizen will be faced with public issues whose discussion requires some scientific background, and therefore every citizen should have some level of scientific literacy” (Hazen, Trefil 2009, pp. 16). All of the sciences are simple, you just need to understand the central concepts to understand the rest. An example of this idea would be “It’s obvious that if we want people to be able to understand issues involving genetic engineering, then we have to tell them what genetic engineering is, how DNA and RNA work, and how all living systems use the same genetic code” (Hazen, Trefil 2009, pp. 17). Being scientifically literate is
The main scope of this book was on the natural sciences, with little emphasis on the social sciences. Some of the main focuses were Biology, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry. Both authors of this book are physical scientist. Thefil is a physicist while Hazen is a geophysicist. This factors into the idea of how several scientists believe that field of science is more important, as well as interesting. I also believe that they might have taken a physical science approach, since students tend to try and avoid physics due to all the math calculations involved. Students prefer life science classes more due to their nature approach and absence of math …show more content…
Scientific Literacy is a mix of several different concepts. It includes history and philosophy which help to allow you to understand the scientific issues of our time. If you can understand the scientific issues you read or hear about then you are considered to be scientifically literate. Literacy is a fundamental concept that is conflicted with the simple view of reading and writing, which has a large impact on literacy instruction in schools, and, we believe, is widely assumed in science education. There are suggestions for how scientific literacy could be viewed differently if the fundamental sense of literacy was taken more seriously. This would be accomplished by teachers exploring educational implications by including literacy in its fundamental sense into the science classroom. “Every citizen will be faced with public issues whose discussion requires some scientific background, and therefore every citizen should have some level of scientific literacy” (Hazen, Trefil 2009, pp. 16). All of the sciences are simple, you just need to understand the central concepts to understand the rest. An example of this idea would be “It’s obvious that if we want people to be able to understand issues involving genetic engineering, then we have to tell them what genetic engineering is, how DNA and RNA work, and how all living systems use the same genetic code” (Hazen, Trefil 2009, pp. 17). Being scientifically literate is