Science in the Service of Citizens & Consumers: The NSF Workshop on Public Knowledge of Science, October 2010

During the preparation of the 2010 Science & Engineering Indicators, there arose a concern about measures of public knowledge of science, and how well they capture public knowledge for Chapter Seven of the Indicators. A workshop at NSF in October 2010 concluded that the process of measuring and reporting public knowledge of science should start with the question of what knowledge a person in the public needs, whether for civic engagement with science and science policy, or for making individual decisions about one’s life or health, or for feeding one’s curiosity about science. This starting point is different from that which informed the previous conceptual framework, when the principal purpose was to measure “civic scientific literacy” as a reflection of scientific knowledge in general. The revised conceptual framework entails a series of consequences for how we think about relations between the public and scientific knowledge, as well as a package of recommendations for measuring that knowledge.