Views and Value of an Undergraduate General Education on Advancing Student Attitudes and Engagement with Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The enhancement of science literacy is a longstanding educational goal of liberal education programs. We conducted a mixed methods study to investigate undergraduate student science attitudes and engagement with science, with specific interests on student program (science vs. nonscience), level of study (junior: 1st and 2nd year, vs. senior: 4th+ year), and over a single general education science literacy course (pre vs. post). Data were collected through an online questionnaire (n=272) and semi-structured interviews (n=19). We found that self- assessed science literacy was higher post compared to pre, in senior compared to junior and for science compared to nonscience students. In contrast, interest in learning science topics did not increase pre-post or junior-senior but was high overall. Belief in pseudoscience was also high overall, including senior and science students, groups we expected pseudoscience belief to be lower. This work highlights the need to align science curriculum with student interests while differentiating science from pseudoscience topics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".