JoinWhat Undergraduates Choose to Think and Write About When Reading Science News Articles on the Internet
Students are scientifically literate when they can read material about science and intelligently communicate their viewpoints, comments, and critiques, using scientific vocabulary and applying the ideas of the process and nature of science. As part of their normal class, 80 students were asked to find an article on the internet, read it, and then write one page of comments to hand in. From the collected papers, six categories of comments emerged: Emotion, Opinion, Knowledge, Society, Motivation, and Technical. The majority of the students wrote comments that suggest they were thinking about how the article fits in their world.