IBSE Final

Chapter 4 Teaching Science as Inquiry

tHE tEACHING OF SCIENCE: 21 st-CENTURY PERSPECTIVES 95

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Science Teaching and

Assessing Students’

Scientific Literacy

In this chapter, I introduce some dimensions of scientific literacy and describe

PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, as the basis for under-

standing scientific literacy from both teaching and assessment perspectives.

Most science educators agree that the purpose of school science is to help

students achieve levels of scientific literacy. The following discussion answers

these questions: What do we mean by scientific literacy? What does scientific

literacy imply for curriculum and instruction? What counts as achieving scien-

tific literacy?

In Achieving Scientific Literacy: From Purpose to Practices (Bybee 1997), I

summarize a conceptual framework for scientific literacy. The framework is a

threshold model, which assumes that scientific literacy is continuously distrib-

uted within the population. At one extreme one can identify a small number

of scientifically illiterate individuals; then, and across the population, there

is a distribution of individuals who demonstrate increasingly greater degrees

of scientific literacy. At the other end of the distribution there exists a small

number of individuals whose level of scientific literacy is extremely high. The

model also accommodates different perspectives, such as science disciplines,

history and nature of science, relationships between science and society, and

so on. The degree of scientific literacy demonstrated by any individual at any

one time is a function of a range of factors—age, developmental stage, life

experiences, and quality of science education, which includes an individual’s

formal, informal, and incidental learning experiences. The model describes

certain thresholds that separate degrees of scientific literacy. The framework

likewise provides a larger model that is useful to those constructing school

science programs or teaching science.

The conceptual framework also favors inclusion rather than exclusion.

Some attempts to define scientific literacy assume an either/or perspective: One