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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1433919

Assessing scientific literacy: A study with 9th grade students in Portugal

Provisionally accepted
Marcelo Coppi Marcelo Coppi *Isabel Fialho Isabel Fialho Marília Cid Marília Cid
  • Research Center in Education and Psychology, University of Évora, Évora, Portugal

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Aiming to assess the scientific literacy level of Portuguese 9th grade students and analyse whether the variables sex, liking for the subjects of Natural Sciences and Physical-Chemistry, failure in these subjects, school socio-economic context and course option were associated to the students' scientific literacy levels, we applied the Avaliação da Literacia Científica Essencial (ALCE) instrument to 516 students. Overall, the results showed that the majority of students were at the moderate level and that 64.1% were scientifically literate. Analysing by subtest, we found that in the Nature of Science (NOS) and Impact of Science and Technology on Society (ISTS) subtests, the majority of students were at the moderate level and in the Content of Science (CS) subtest, the majority were at the low level of scientific literacy; whereas 70.0%, 72.9% and 39.9% of students were classified as scientifically literate in the NOS, ISTS and CS subtests, respectively. The greatest difficulties were concentrated in the CS subtest, particularly in Biology, Physics and Chemistry. The analysis according to the independent variables shows that the students' scientific literacy level might be associated with their liking for the subjects of Natural Sciences and Physical-Chemistry and their expectations regarding the profession they wish to pursue in the future.

    Keywords: ALCE, Basic education, content of science, impact of science and technology on society, Nature of science, science education, scientific literacy assessment

    Received: 16 May 2024; Accepted: 25 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Coppi, Fialho and Cid. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Marcelo Coppi, Research Center in Education and Psychology, University of Évora, Évora, Portugal

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.