U.S. public's knowledge of science: getting better but a long way to go

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8265

Feb. 15, 2011

U.S. public's knowledge of science: getting better but a long way to go

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Amid concerns about the lagging math and science performance of American children, American adults are actually scoring higher than they did 20 years ago on a widely used index of civic scientific literacy, according to a University of Michigan researcher.

In 1988, just 10 percent of U.S. adults had sufficient understanding of basic scientific ideas to be able to read the Tuesday Science section of The New York Times, according to Jon Miller, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). By 2008, 28 percent of adults scored high enough to understand scientific ideas at that level.

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Only 37 percent of American adults accepted the concept of biological evolution in 2008, Miller reports, and the level of acceptance has declined over the last twenty years. Approximately 44 percent of American adults can define DNA correctly, but only 20 percent can define the meaning of a stem cell.

While 85 percent of adults recognize that all plants and animals have DNA, only 27 percent of Americans think that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice.

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A copy of Science and the Educated American: A Core Component of Liberal Education, may be downloaded free of charge at http://www.amacad.org/publications/scienceSLAC.aspx