Functional scientific literacy: Disciplinary literacy meets multiple source use

Lab coats and microscopes, rather than keyboards and word processors, and experimentation and discovery, rather than composition and rhetoric, are what people tend to associate with scientists and scientific work (Van Gorp, Rommes, and Emons, 2014). Yet, the production of scientific knowledge occurs as much through the selection and arrangement of prose as through the choice of variables and their manipulation (Latour, 1981). Literacy practices are inherent to scientific activity (Bazerman, 1988; Neuwirth and Contijoch, 2003; Yarden, Norris, and Phillips, 2015). This is true for lay as well as professional engagement with science, and science communication plays a key role in public engagement with science (Bromme and Goldman, 2014; National Science Board, 2016).