cc  >> Hello, thank you for watching Wednesday Night @ the Lab tonight. I'm *Cassie Hamill and I will be introducing the speaker tonight. We will be having Noah Feinstein. He is assistant professor here at Madison with the Curriculum of Instruction. He has a Bachelors in Biology at Harvard and a Masters and PhD at Stanford and the Masters and PhD are in Science Education.  Tonight he'll be just discussing the public engagement with science and with a particular focus on how people learn about the science and how personally important it is to them and about the health topics. So if I could introduce Mr. Feinstein.  >> Thanks Cassie. How's the volume? Can you hear me? Okay? Great. As a new faculty member, I approach this podium with some humility, know the luminaries who have been here before and those who will doubtless follow. It's similar to the humility with witch I approach my first Wisconsin winter after nine years in California. I'm impressed with all of your coming out tonight. I know that if I wasn't supposed to be here, I'd be winging my way home right now.  In some ways its odd to find myself in this positions and I am sort of an odd addition to this series of talks because I'm a lot less concerned about the science that goes on in a lab than I am with the stuff that goes on around your kitchen table. I'm less interested in teh science that goes into a profession journal than I am in the science that gets out of a professional journal, that escapes from a lab or a lecture hall and takes on meaning in everyday life.  In another way it's very fitting that I'm here because I'm a science educator and a science education researcher and most of my research is about what we might call self education or self directed education.  Your presence here tonight is proof of the vitality of that strange and mysterious creature called public engagement with science. Now, I'm tempted to flatter you some more to make you more positively inclined towards the content that follows, but I think I've already used up a couple of minutes of my time and I want to make sure we have space for questions afterwards.  So, with that I will truly begin, and I'd like to begin with a story. It's a story about a parent whose pseudonym is Sheri. Sheri's son Alex has Asperger's Syndrome, but that's not what she's worried about. Alex, who is four, is disturbingly violent towards his two year old sister. In Sheri's words, it's clear the intention is to hurt. He'll go up and poke her right in the eye and you can see that he's taking enjoyment from hurting her. Because Alex often waits until Sheri has turned her back to pinch, hit, or push, Sheri no longer feels she can leave the two of them alone.  By my seventh interview with her, she was close to panic. She referred to her four year old son as "scary." And wondered if he might be psychotic on top of his autism. Every question I asked brought her back to the topic of Alex's agression. While I asked her whether she'd read anything about autism in the news, she said "no, except for the teenager with special needs that killed his mom recently."  It really had me scared. Somebody was talking about it the other day and I think it was local and I just thought, oh Lord, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. So, what sort of science education prepares you for this? That may seem like an odd question to you, but if you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain how I as a science education researcher got interested in public engagement with science and why I think public engagement with science and the study of public engagement with science is crucial to science education.  In some sense, the story starts 50 years ago when a scholar named *Paul De Hart Kerr coined the phrase "science literacy." It's 50 years ago this year for about a month longer. Since then, a great deal of ink has been spilled on the topic of science literacy. Most of what's been written falls into two categories, what I call visions of science literacy and inventories of science literacy.  Inventories are lists of facts and principles, skills that scientists and teachers believe that you should acquire in order to become a scientifically literate individual. Visions of science literacy are pictures of what we as citizens and as a society might be able to acheive were we only science literate. 

 Now, it's a strange fact that in five decades, very little research has connected divisions in the inventories