Swans on Tea

Is our children learning science?

Science Indicators: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

Science literacy, or, to be more precise, the lack of science literacy.

The wrong answers to all these questions are idiotic, but they’re not idiotic in a religious way, unless I’ve been missing the public lobbying from the First Church of the Acousto-Optic God. The problem isn’t religion, or political lobbying, or idiot celebrities peddling quackery– the problem is that we do a piss-poor job of teaching science, period. All fields, all areas, people are not getting the science education they need.

Excellent point.

Update: I had missed something important in originally posting this. from Sheril’s summary

The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27*

* that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly

Um, not necessarily. It’s a crappy question — characterizing the big bang as a “huge explosion” is is way too ambiguous, IMO. Most people think of an explosion in the sense of setting off some dynamite, or something similar, and it wasn’t: it was a rapid expansion of spacetime. A question where understanding more may actually reduce the score.