Can we increase students’ scientific literacy while minimizing disciplinary content in a multidisciplinary science course?

Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS) 137 is a multidisciplinary science laboratory course designed for non-science majors at our campus. An overarching objective of the course is to increase scientific problem solving skills and attitudes among the students by having them practice science by completing experiments rather than study discipline-specific course content. Three instructors have worked together to organize the course such that students complete four labs in each of biology, chemistry and physics. To quantitatively measure gains in scientific literacy of IDS 137 students, we developed the Augustana Interdisciplinary Scientific Literacy Evaluation (AISLE). The AISLE includes twenty multiple-choice questions that students complete at the beginning and again at the end of the course. Questions are designed to probe students’ scientific thinking and attitudes in a multidisciplinary manner. The answers are scored using a scale of 2, 1 or 0 for best, acceptable and least correct answers and generates a numeric score that corresponds to scientific skills and attitudes. I will outline the instructional strategy we used to design the course and the criteria we selected to develop the AISLE such that it would reliably measure gains in scientific literacy among the enrolled students. The validity of AISLE was established by collecting calibration data from undergraduate students in non-science majors, from science majors at various stages of their degree and from professors. I will invite the audience to investigate samples of the AISLE problems and test their scientific literacy first hand to evaluate how effectively our approach probes scientific skills and attitudes. I will conclude by presenting the calibration data and compare it to data we have collected from IDS 137 students from two academic years