Scientific literacy: It’s not just the textbooks. Psychology students score higher, too
About 10 years ago, a colleague and I compared scientific literacy content in introductory science textbooks(Macias & Macias, 2009). We found that psychology textbooks dedicated an average of about 21 pages to such content; about three times the amount in biology texts and 10 times what was typical for physics and chemistry (see Figure 1). But, as we pointed out elsewhere, this textual advantage may not translate into variations in student knowledge (Macias & Macias, 2018). The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in students’ acquisition of scientific literacy.