‘More than 40 per cent of Australians do not know how long it takes the Earth to travel around the sun, according to a new survey.’

This was how ABC news opened its story last month on the Australian Academy of Science’s findings about science literacy in Australia – the results of an online survey of 1515 people. Other news outlets ran the story too, giving column space to how people failed to identify how much of the earth’s surface was ocean (only 39% got it right), or whether humans coexisted with dinosaurs (73% passed). Only Gizmodo framed their headline to mirror exactly what most of us were thinking: ‘The Five Dumbest Science ‘Facts’ Believed by Australians.‘

‘How can people be so stupid?’ we asked each other over coffee or on Twitter the next day. ‘I blame the parents!‘ commented one person on the ABC site; another wrote that ‘I would put it down to the dilution of education … Excursions for films, way to much sport and so on’. ‘It’s the dumbest people having the most children,’ wrote another. The Academy’s Professor Les Field himself pointed the finger at Google and the school curriculum. ‘I would hope that a survey like ours is a wake-up call that says there is an issue, an underlying issue that we need to address,’ he said.

The problem is, this survey actually tells us very little. Its questions ask the wrong things, its method is severely flawed, and what data it does provide is used to leap to invalid conclusions, not just by the media and the public, but by the academics at the Academy themselves. In fact, when compared to proper scientific studies on science education outcomes, this study paints a completely wrong picture of the state of Australia’s science literacy – a reprehensible outcome for a prestigious organisation that’s influencing science policy.

In fact, the whole project uses such bad science from start to finish that it’s a great teaching tool about science – but only by demonstrating what not to do. Let’s take a look at where it goes wrong, why it’s giving the wrong message to policymakers and a detrimental message to the public, and how things could be done better next time. Because science literacy is vital enough that it’s worth getting right.

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