Pop Quiz, Hotshot

Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz

Took this the other day but am only now getting around to posting (holiday distraction). And with the taking of any scientific literacy quiz, there is the obligatory comment on what scientific literacy is or is not.

It’s not a bad quiz, other than the slide-show implementation of it and reloading the page to grade each question, but it’s not great, either, and it suffers from the problem that any multiple-choice quiz is going to have: it becomes a test of facts rather than concepts, and science literacy is more than memorization of facts.

I won’t hazard a guess where the literacy cutoff is, because some of the questions lean toward trivia and from my view, knowing trivia is not really synonymous with literacy. Knowing why Pluto was demoted from planet status shows more literacy than knowing the name of the orbiting body whose discovery led to that act, for example. Knowing what Mendel discovered is more important than remembering what plant he used to discover it, unless you can take it up a notch and know why he was lucky to have studied that plant for study (it had a simple structure which facilitated the discovery — one gene per feature). Knowing what two planets don’t have moons is not as important as being able to use some physics to reason why this might be, and a test like this doesn’t distinguish between the two approaches.

But you do have to have some facts at your disposal. Knowing the major constituent of air is important, too, as is knowing your way around the periodic table, and other things that show up on the quiz. Scientifically literate people will do well, overall, because they will probably know the trivia, having picked it up in the process of learning the concepts.