University Students' Interpretation of Media Reports of Science and its Relationship to Background Knowledge, Interest, and Reading Difficulty

Three hundred and eight first and second year university students were asked to read five media reports that described recent scientific research and findings. We instructed the students to interpret and make judgments about the certainty, status, and role of statements identified in the reports, and to assess how much knowledge they had about the general topics of the reports, their interest in the general topics, and their difficulty reading each report. Students' performance on the interpretive tasks mirrored in major detail the performance of a group of high school students studied previously. The university students displayed a certainty bias in their responses to questions regarding truth status, confused cause and correlation, and had difficulty distinguishing explanations of phenomena from the phenomena themselves. The university students' self-assessments of their knowledge, interests, and reading difficulty were able to explain virtually none of the variance in their interpretive performance. In general, the university students had an inflated view of their ability to understand the five media reports. Implications for the development of scientific literacy are discussed.