Development and Validation of the Scientific Reasoning Scale

Abstract

Scientific findings and innovations play an important role in a range of decisions faced by nonscientists, yet little is known about the skills that nonscientists need in order to read and evaluate scientific evidence. Drawing on research in public understanding of science, cognitive developmental psychology, and behavioral decision research, we develop an individual difference measure of scientific reasoning skills, defined as the skills needed to evaluate scientific findings in terms of the factors that determine their quality. We present the results of three studies assessing its psychometric validity. Our results indicate that the Scientific Reasoning Scale (SRS) is internally consistent and distinct from extant measures of scientific literacy. Participants with higher SRS scores are more likely to have beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus on potentially contentious issues, above and beyond education, political and religious beliefs, and scores on two widely used measures of scientific literacy. Participants with higher SRS scores also had better performance on a task requiring them to analyze scientific information. Our results suggest that the SRS provides a theoretically informed contribution to decoding lay responses to scientific results and controversies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

“…The SRS is an 11-item test that presents subjects with a scientific scenario and asks them a true/false question related to the scenario (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017a). The SRS is constructed to test understanding of general scientific concepts, such as random assignment, causal inference, ecological validity, and so on.…”

Perceptions of emerging biotechnologies

“…Our study included both a measure of subjective knowledge about each biotechnology product and objective ability to think scientifically. Ability to think scientifically, rather than testing for fact-based knowledge, tests for general scientific reasoning skills [4]. Interestingly, we found that individuals who perceived biotechnology to be risky and believed it needed to be regulated had strong scientific reasoning skills, a subtle-yet important-distinction from previous findings.…”

“…The survey established basic demographics about respondents including age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, political ideology, and income. Previously established groups of questions were included to measure pro-environmentalism (New Environmental Paradigm: NEP) [15], personal values [16], and scientific reasoning skills [4]. In addition to these established scales, questions based on the willingness to sacrifice framework [17], about levels of trust in academic, government, and industry scientists, and about religious beliefs were also used to generate scales.…”

“…In 2015, 88% of American Association for the Advancement of Science members surveyed responded that genetically modified (GM) foods were safe to eat, while only 37% of the general public agreed [1]. While such findings support the idea that scientific knowledge could lessen public opposition to biotechnology, research in this area has shown mixed results [2][3][4]. Therefore, while technological advances have improved the ease and precision with which organisms can be engineered, the scientific community continues to grapple with how biotechnology should be applied, discussed, and regulated [5,6].…”

Validity and reliability analyses for the climate of science subjects research tool

“…It is also comparable with other sources like. 47 The use of the factor analysis for the determination of construct validity, showed acceptable results, the items of research tool were distributed into three factors and all conditions for the use of the exploratory factor analysis were respected. During the use of the factor analysis, it was accepted that one item in one factor and every factor loading score for the item was higher than 0.40.…”