Collaborative Research: Focusing a General Science Course on Improving Science Literacy

跨学科（99）。麦克丹尼尔学院和南康涅狄格州立大学（SCSU）之间的这种合作汇集了一个私人的，住宅文科学院与公立综合大学，为非科学专业开发通识教育课程，以提高学生的科学过程技能，他们对科学的态度，以及他们对科学本质的理解。为了实现这一目标，课程材料旨在加强学生的科学意识，扩大他们的理解和进行实验的能力，并培养对科学与社会之间关系的认识。来自许多学科的科学内容有助于激励和巩固学生的学习，并为发展科学素养提供了一个工具。一套十七个模块，每个侧重于一个狭窄的范围内的科学素养技能是该项目的计划成果。通过实践活动，练习，讨论和/或项目的组合，模块侧重于让学生能够更好地观察和记录自然现象;测量物理现象;确定科学与社会之间的重要联系;或了解科学知识的进展和组织。两个机构之间的合作确保了广泛的学生使用这些材料。麦克丹尼尔主办学生在住宅文科社区，在那里的材料是在一个小的，综合实验室讨论教室设置使用。SCSU的学生在纽黑文市体验一所公立综合大学，学生在中等规模的讲座环境中体验以研究为基础，以活动为中心的课程中的材料。拟议活动的智力价值在于提高教育界对在大学一级可以做些什么来帮助提高国家科学素养的理解，特别是对传统上代表性不足的群体的学生。多年来，不断有人呼吁提高美国学生的科学素养。然而，对具体科学内容的理解仍然主导着通识教育课程的学习目标。精心设计的课程材料培养学生自己的创造力，科学推理能力和他们对科学的态度和理解将有助于他们看到科学的相关性。反过来，通过培养更多知情的学生担任小学和中学科学教师以及培养更多知情的公民，创造了一个科学能力的循环。

Interdisciplinary (99). This collaboration between McDaniel College and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) brings together a private, residential liberal arts college with a public, comprehensive university to develop a general education course for non-science majors to improve students' scientific process skills, their attitudes toward science, and their understanding of the nature of science. To accomplish this, course materials are designed to strengthen students' sense of science, expand their ability to understand and conduct experiments, and cultivate recognition of the relationships between science and society. Science content from a host of disciplines helps to motivate and ground students' learning and provide a vehicle for developing scientific literacy. A suite of seventeen modules, each focusing on a narrow range of scientific literacy skills is the planned outcome of this project. Through a combination of hands-on activities, exercises, discussions, and/or projects, modules focus, for example, on having students be better able to observe and record natural phenomena; measure physical phenomena; identify significant links between science and society; or understand the progression and organization of scientific knowledge. The collaboration between the two institutions ensures that a broad range of students use the materials. McDaniel hosts students in a residential liberal arts community, where materials are used in a small, integrated laboratory-discussion classroom setting. SCSU's students experience a public, comprehensive university in urban New Haven, where students experience the materials in a researched-based, activities-centered course situated in a medium-sized lecture environment. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity rests on increasing the education community's understanding of what can be done at the college-level to help improve national science literacy, particularly with students in traditionally underrepresented groups. For years there have been repeated calls to raise American students' scientific literacy. Yet, understanding of specific science content still dominates learning goals for general education courses. Well-crafted curricular materials fostering students' own creative, scientific reasoning skills and their attitudes about and understanding of science will help them see science's relevancy. In turn a cycle of scientific competency is created through the development of more informed students entering the roles of elementary and secondary-science teachers as well as the creation of more informed citizens.