ABSTRACT
What scientific literacy is depends very much on the conception of knowing and learning that one associates with it. Despite differences in the definition of scientific literacy, the current reform rhetoric describes the individual informed citizen as one who participates in public discourses and uses rather than produces science. Many citizens are said to have blanks in their background knowledge left by formal education and therefore need to be given information to fill those gaps; some even suggest more strongly that most people are not only ignorant but also incapable of scientific literacy. Like the makers of the film A Private Universe, many science educators mocked the answers that Harvard graduates gave to the question, “Why is it hotter in summer than in winter?” Thus, Bruce Matson, the flight director of the Challenger Center at Framingham State College, part of the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Center for Education and Teaching Excellence, said, the Harvard graduates gave “bizarre and contrived explanations” to the most basic astronomy questions.1 Matson, like many science educators, defined scientific literacy in terms of the answers that individuals give to questions in interviews or on questionnaires. Because every citizen should have some level of scientific literacy, so the general argument goes, the implications of such individualist takes on scientific literacy are finding ways in which the individual comes to know more of the facts (and sometimes processes) of science.
