Explanation:
There is broad agreement in the United States that scientific literacy is a good thing, that we don't have enough of it, and that it is especially important for our young people to have a lot more of it. There is also broad agreement that schools are the place where young people should get their scientific literacy and that formal institutions of education are failing to produce a minimal level of scientific literacy in an acceptable proportion of our young people. Most Americans, to borrow from the Declaration of Independence, find these truths to be self-evident. As educators and scientists, however, we cannot accept truths as self-evident, but must seek to understand better the roots of scientific literacy and the social, economic, and political consequences of scientific illiteracy.
Having spent the last several years studying data about young people's knowledge of and attitude toward science and having talked with a large number of students and teachers, I am convinced that functional scientific literacy requires some level of formal science and mathematics instruction. Informal learning programs like museums and television shows can augment formal instruction and stimulate interest in it, but these informal experiences cannot effectively replace or substitute for formal science instruction. Further, it is clear to me that functional scientific literacy requires the ability to read about science and technology to be able to sustain literacy in the decades after the end of formal instruction.
The basic problem is that formal instruction in science and mathematics has become voluntary in most American high schools and that attitudes have developed that discourage the vast majority of young Americans from attempting formal coursework in chemistry, physics, and mathematics beyond first-year algebra. Only 15% of last year's American high-school graduates had completed a physics course during their high-school experience, and only 30% had taken a chemistry course. Forty-five percent had avoided any contact with algebra throughout their 4 years of high school. And these figures apply only to students who graduated, excluding the sizable proportion that dropped out before graduation. Further, the data indicate that young women avoid science and mathematics at almost double the rate of young men. The problems are serious.
As scientists and educators, we must ask why so many young Americans decide not to study science and mathematics during their high-school years, and it is this question that has driven most of my recent work in this area. It is critically important that we come to understand the reasons for this pattern of science and mathematics avoidance. The British government recently addressed this problem by mandating that all British students take science and mathematics every year that they are in school and that they be tested through a national testing program to measure results. Compulsion is one solution, but with 16,000 independent school boards in the United States, compulsion is not an alternative available to us, regardless of its merits. If we are to do a good job with science and mathematics education in the United States, we must first understand the root sources of the attitudes of young Americans toward science and mathematics and seek to address those issues effectively.
The Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) is one effort to understand better the process of socialization and development of attitudes toward science and technology and citizenship. The LSAY builds on a previous cross-sectional study by Miller et al. (1980) and on the relevant literature. The LSAY will follow a national sample of seventh-graders and a parallel sample of tenth-graders for the next 4 years, collecting data from the students, their parents, their teachers, and related school staff. The base-year student data collection for the LSAY was completed during the 1987-1988 school year.
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Measurement of Interest
