Public Understanding of Science

Building on two decades of national surveys in the United States and two Eurobarometer studies, the history, rationale, and structure of a measure of civic scientific literacy are described. Estimates of the proportion of adults who are very well informed or moderately well informed on the index of civic scientific literacy appear in the literature more frequently, and this paper provides the first comprehensive description and analysis of the civic scientific literacy measure. It is hoped that this analysis and discussion will encourage the inclusion and replication of the measure in a wider range of studies of the public understanding of and attitudes toward science and technology.

Environmental education tends to be characterized by a rhetoric of action-taking, and the call for the development of personal action competence is one manifestation of this. This paper critically examines recent work on the concept of action competence. This is seen as a set of capabilities which equip people with the ability to take purposive and focused action, and which embodies a democratic commitment to be participants in the continuing shaping of society—on their own terms and in their own ways. Action competence is seen by some as a crucial outcome for environmental education because it brings together the processes and practices of education with the need to develop democratic citizenship skills and values, and with the nature of the ecological, social and environmental crises facing the world. This paper acknowledges the contribution such concepts make to environmental education, but takes issue with a tendency within action competence to undervalue the place of science in the construction of knowledge and understanding of environmental issues. We argue that, despíte being dismissed by many environmental educators, science has a significant role to play within effective environmental education, particularly through the achievement of scientific literacy and capability, both of which seem fundamental to an understanding of science, environmental issues, and their interrelationship. The paper argues for a more pragmatic conceptualization of action competence in order to encourage broadly-based and scientifically-attentive conceptions of environmental education.

This paper argues that science centers are expensive to create as capital projects, expensive to maintain with professional staff, and, given the high costs of exhibit development, expensive to change. Lacking a fixed collection of unique artifacts with which to attract visitors, the science center is at risk when it cannot change quickly enough to meet the demands of its users. In the past, temporary exhibitions have been used as a means of creating more frequent change. Now, however, given the exponential increase of the availability of new electronic media, coupled with their massive interconnection via the Internet, informal learning can be had at home and in other sites, rendering the science center unwieldy, expensive, irrelevant, and obsolete. Threats to the science center cannot be lightly shrugged off, and a real transformation of the institution is required. The paper concludes that the science center, as an institution and as a building project, is doomed to extinction as a consequence of two factors—ecology and economy. It argues for the need to develop a new kind of institution of informal learning in its place.