Chapter 8: Developing Science Literacy In Schools And Colleges In Mumbai

This chapter will attempt to determine how students develop as readers, writers, and speakers of chemistry in India. Specifically, we will reveal how students developed science literacy in both an eighth grade classroom and a college undergraduate chemistry study group in the city of Mumbai. By doing so, we hope to determine how cultural contexts may inform science literacy.

Research has attempted to describe the global impact of scientific literacy. While decoding and encoding information in a given text is essential as a first step towards literacy, scientific literacy also involves an additional component of critical literacy (Westby & Torres-Velasquez, 2000). Students develop the ability to synthesize, interpret, and transfer information to alternative situations. Interestingly, scientific literacy might not mean the same thing to all in a global context. Sociocultural contexts play an important role in learning science learning (Carter, 2008). Scientific discourse involves making sense of abstract concepts, many of which may not be easily pictorially represented (Ogborn, Kress, Martins, & McGillicuddy, 1996). Sometimes there is disagreement within a culture as to how to define science literacy. For example, chemists in institutions of higher education in Israel have perceived scientific literacy as the ability of students to understand certain scientific vocabulary, whereas high school science teachers describe the ability of students to be able to transfer science concepts to chemistry as a measure of science literacy (Shwartz, Hofstein, & Ben-Zvi, 2006). This suggests that it may be important to examine how science literacy is defined and developed in multiple countries.