Importance Of Scientific Literacy

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Enhancing the scientific literacy of students has been a goal of science educator for more than a century. Discussion of the aims of science education often begin with ‘scientific literacy’. Scientific literacy is a term that has been used since the late 1950s to describe a desired familiarity with science on the part of the general public (Deboer, G.E., 2000). Scientific literacy plays an important role in human daily life. Many definition have been put forward for scientific literacy. To define the scientific literacy many science educator as well as organization such as National Research Council (NRC) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) draw frameworks and tried to describe the characteristics

There was also a problem which is teacher have a rush to complete syllabus and learning habit of students differ in terms of classes and interest in the subject. The teacher noted that that since the curriculum in the schools was exam oriented the majority of teacher tended to ‘spoon-feed’ their students by copying notes on the board and giving them the answers in assignment (Pandian, A. and Balraj, S., 2010). This situation does not promote scientific literacy among student. That’s why scientific literacy is needed to be implementation in Malaysian

Although the composite sense of scientific literacy has been widely recognize, science education researcher have essentially not measured the concepts in a composite manner. Measure of individual dimensions such as nature of science, attitude towards science and science content knowledge were thus also used and referred to as measures of scientific literacy (Laugksch, R.C., 1999). The dimension of scientific literacy regarding science content knowledge has been of particularly keen interest to science educator as the assessment of students’ conception of various important concepts in science is vital to much of teaching and learning in the science. A number of instrument have been develop to investigate particular aspects of students’ understanding of the nature science. The nature of science is associated with Miller’s third dimension of scientific literacy which is closely allied to science technology society (STS) movement which emphasize a holistic, problem solving approach to science teaching and attempt to deal with current social issues impacting on society (Laugksch, R.C.,