Collaborative Research: Focusing a General Science Course on Improving Science Literacy

Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Interdisciplinary (99). This collaboration between McDaniel College and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) brings together a private, residential liberal arts college with a public, comprehensive university to develop a general education course for non-science majors to improve students' scientific process skills, their attitudes toward science, and their understanding of the nature of science. To accomplish this, course materials are designed to strengthen students' sense of science, expand their ability to understand and conduct experiments, and cultivate recognition of the relationships between science and society. Science content from a host of disciplines helps to motivate and ground students' learning and provide a vehicle for developing scientific literacy. A suite of seventeen modules, each focusing on a narrow range of scientific literacy skills is the planned outcome of this project. Through a combination of hands-on activities, exercises, discussions, and/or projects, modules focus, for example, on having students be better able to observe and record natural phenomena; measure physical phenomena; identify significant links between science and society; or understand the progression and organization of scientific knowledge. The collaboration between the two institutions ensures that a broad range of students use the materials. McDaniel hosts students in a residential liberal arts community, where materials are used in a small, integrated laboratory-discussion classroom setting. SCSU's students experience a public, comprehensive university in urban New Haven, where students experience the materials in a researched-based, activities-centered course situated in a medium-sized lecture environment. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity rests on increasing the education community's understanding of what can be done at the college-level to help improve national science literacy, particularly with students in traditionally underrepresented groups. For years there have been repeated calls to raise American students' scientific literacy. Yet, understanding of specific science content still dominates learning goals for general education courses. Well-crafted curricular materials fostering students' own creative, scientific reasoning skills and their attitudes about and understanding of science will help them see science's relevancy. In turn a cycle of scientific competency is created through the development of more informed students entering the roles of elementary and secondary-science teachers as well as the creation of more informed citizens.