On the Topic of Scientific Literacy

In class this morning my teacher was talking about Climate Change and how maybe different misinterpretations about it exist. Now one of the main points of his lecture was that few people in the general populous are "scientifically literate". What does this mean? According to his definition it meant that they did not know enough about science to be able to weigh evidence and assess the validity of statements coming from the scientific field.

Now, I don't deny that many people can't read a bit of primary literature and make sense out of it. It's really a difficult thing to do. You need a lot of practice to make head of tails out of some of those papers. However, I don't think that this stems only from a general lack of scientific knowledge.

For instance last year I took a class about teaching biology to highschoolers. It was a really wonderful class, one of my favorites at UW. During one of our group discussions the teacher asked all of us students (mostly people getting a masters in teaching biology) to explain the statistical analysis in the paper we were reading. The surprising thing was that only four of us knew what it was. The other remaining future science teachers had no idea, but just read that they results were "statistically significant". Now, is this the fault of the scientists in the room? Or did this also have something to do with the people writing the papers?

First of all, the general education system doesn't teach people to be able to dissect a scientific paper. There isn't really time to teach something like that when we are worried about doing well on the SAT.
Second of all, scientist are not educated heavily in literature, or english, or communication in general. So what we end up with is a bunch of people who can't read papers that were written my scientist that use very confusing english. Great. So I don't really agree with scientist or professors who are saying that people can't understand scientific literature because they don't understand science. Half of the time I don't understand scientific literature, and I consider myself to be a scientifically literate person. And this issues doesn't just surround the study of climate change. It also effects people's understanding of health, diet, exercise, climate change, and any number of other scientific fields that relate to the welfare of people.

I am a little disappointed with the lack of education on both sides of the issue. On a side note, my teacher has got to be the cutest little nerdy man on the planet. His name is Nigel and he as a squeaky voice. It's fabulous.