Assessing literacy in science: evaluation of scientific news briefs

Media reports of scientific research are a pervasive and important source of new scientific knowledge. Evaluating conclusions found in those reports is an important form of scientific literacy. We examined the types of requests for information made by university students as they evaluated scientific news briefs. Students generated a variety of requests for information, focusing most often on how the research was conducted and why the results might have occurred. Fewer requests were made for information about what was found, who conducted the research, and where it was conducted. Least frequent were requests about related research. This pattern of findings may reflect emphasis of instruction in science classrooms. Requests appeared to be influenced by three dimensions of news briefs: plausibility of the conclusions; typicality (the degree to which the phenomena described are typical in biology, chemistry, and physics); and personal familiarity with the phenomena. Individual differences in age, number of science courses completed in university, and degree of belief in paranormal events were correlated with the types of requests made. Models of the evaluative process are needed to gain additional insights into how students' knowledge, dimensions of text, and personal characteristics interact in the course of learning. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.