… What should be measured, in my view, is a quality of ordinary science intelligence — not some inventory of facts (“electrons are smaller than atoms — check!”) but rather an ability to to distinguish valid from invalid claims to scientific insight and a disposition to use science’s signature style of inference form observation.
The National Science Foundation has been engaged in the project of trying to formulate and promote such a measure for quite some time. A few years ago it came to the conclusion that the item “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” shouldn’t be included when computing “science literacy.”
The reason was simple: the answer people give to this question doesn’t measure their comprehension of science. People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren’t any more likely to get this item “correct” than those who do poorly on the remaining portions. What the NSF’s evolution item does measure, researchers have concluded, is test-takers’ cultural identities, and in particular the centrality of religion in their lives. CONT.
Dan Kahan, Cultural Cognition Project, Yale Law School