title: Does the Sun revolve around the Earth? A comparison between the general public and online survey respondents in basic scientific knowledge.
abstract: We conducted an online survey using a set of factual science questions that are commonly administered to assess fact-based scientific literacy. We report that the online population performed substantially better on this standard assessment than the traditional survey population. For example, it has been widely reported that 1 in 4 Americans does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, whereas among the online population, this ratio is reduced to 1 in 25. While new online platforms provide researchers with unprecedented ease of access to a large sample population for studying trends in public knowledge and attitudes, generalizing from online population samples to the US population at large poses a considerable challenge. We discuss the potential reasons for this discrepancy and the implications for conducting research online.
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, USA eacooper@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Emily A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Cooper
authors.affiliation: Dartmouth College, USA.
authors.forename: Hany
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Farid
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D032882:Comprehension; D058980:Information Literacy; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D019359:Knowledge; D012586:Science / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States
keywords: Amazon Mechanical Turk; online surveys; scientific literacy; survey methods