In this paper, we explored the scientific literacy of a general sample of the Slovak adult population and examined factors that might help or inhibit scientific reasoning, namely the content of the problems. In doing so, we also verified the assumption that when faced with real-life scientific problems, people do not necessarily apply decontextualized knowledge of methodological principles, but reason from the bottom up, i.e. by predominantly relying on heuristics based on what they already know or believe about the topic. One thousand and twelve adults completed three measures of scientific literacy (science knowledge, scientific reasoning, attitudes to science) and several other related constructs (numeracy, need for cognition, PISA tasks). In general, Slovak participants’ performance on scientific reasoning tasks was fairly low and dependent on the context in which the problems were presented—there was a 63% success rate for a version with concrete problems and a 56% success rate for the decontextualized version. The main contribution of this study is a modification and validation of the scientific reasoning scale using a large sample size, which allows for more thorough testing of all components of scientific literacy.

在本文中，我们探讨了斯洛伐克成年人的一般样本的科学素养，并检查了可能有助于或抑制科学推理的因素，即问题的内容。在这样做的过程中，我们还验证了这样一个假设，即当面对现实生活中的科学问题时，人们不一定会应用脱离背景的方法学原理知识，而是自下而上地进行推理，即主要依赖于基于他们已经知道的启发式或相信这个话题。1112 名成年人完成了三项科学素养（科学知识、科学推理、对科学的态度）和其他几个相关结构（计算能力、认知需求、PISA 任务）的测量。一般来说，斯洛伐克参与者在科学推理任务上的表现相当低，并且取决于提出问题的背景——有具体问题的版本的成功率为 63%，去上下文的版本的成功率为 56%。本研究的主要贡献是使用大样本量对科学推理量表进行了修改和验证，从而可以更彻底地测试科学素养的所有组成部分。