This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Education C‑class Mid‑importance

	Education portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Education, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of education and education-related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EducationWikipedia:WikiProject EducationTemplate:WikiProject Educationeducation articles
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Linguistics: Applied Linguistics C‑class

	Linguistics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics articles
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Applied Linguistics Task Force.

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Science C‑class

	Science portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Science on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ScienceWikipedia:WikiProject ScienceTemplate:WikiProject Sciencescience articles
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Beefed up new page

Added citations, references to other sources and wikified page. Also added categories. Alex Jackl 04:16, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions

It seems like it might be worth mentioning the push to educate students in the STEM fields in this article, as the NSF is involved in those efforts. It also seems like the article could use a more international perspective, as most of it is focused on scientific literacy in the USA. --Driefler (talk) 17:36, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Correct, I'm going to try and figure out how to put this kind of "tag" in the articleKlandri (talk) 01:35, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I found the right tag. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:42, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Most Unfortunate

I don't have time to deal with this but the basic fact a person would want to know, what is the numerical rate of scientific literacy in various populations is here linked to broken links and in the various studies occluded and obfuscated. Typically you are finding surveys asking whether people think the sun is the center of the solar system, whether human beings evolved, and so forth and everything is skewed to middle schoolers rather than adult populations. If you assume that full prose proficiency is required for scientific literacy, large studies have shown that in the general U.S. population this is below 20% for the adult white population, as judged by testing with materials that would be encountered in everyday life. So there's a general ignoring of the question of actual scientific literacy in favor of some kind of fuzzy opinion research on how many flat earthers, creationists, climate change deniers, etc. there are. Pitiful but if someone wants to put in the time I'm pretty sure you'll find that the numbers are quite a bit lower than what comes back from these surveys. Roughly 15% in the EU and North America is probably being generous. A few places such as Singapore, Japan, Estonia, etc. may be significantly higher. As a world wide value probably in the quite low single digits, if your standard was say the ability to read an issue of Nature. The underlying hard truth is the ignorant are easier to rule by appeal to their emotions and prejudices than people that can think for themselves rationally, so politics generally has encouraged or at the very least tolerated ignorance rather than confront and call it out for what it is, a gross failure of human being. Indeed, it, politics, whether authoritarian or democratic, thrives on it and is essentially a reflection of it.98.4.124.117 (talk) 03:19, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Still no numbers and now apparently mostly dead linked sources ...

.. since I made the above remark. FWIW, it can be inferred that with modestly rigorously criteria such as assuming full prose proficiency is a requirement for scientific literacy, the rate in the US and OECD countries for the general adult population, as a single fuzzy estimate, is in the low teens at most. Lycurgus (talk)

I don't really have time to do the research, but the dead links were easily fixed using the Wayback Machine (if you want to know how to do it yourself in future, read Wikipedia:Link rot). RockMagnetist(talk) 19:00, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Familiar with it (wayback/inet archive); the research wouldn't be worth performing for presentation here, because the construction of a figure such as my surmise above would be considered OR, since the available statistics aren't oriented toward that level of salience, they are oriented toward school performance, specific questions etc. Smart of you not to bother. Generally the figures that are available are based on the percent that accept evolution, know the earth goes around the sun and not the reverse, or other basic single facts and are several times what daily experience indicates is the case in the sense I said. 98.4.103.219 (talk) 21:22, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]