"Over the last three decades, the study of the public understanding of science and technology has become a visible and recognized area of scholarship. It is certainly not an academic discipline, and probably not a viable field of study apart from other strong disciplinary roots, but it has produced a cluster of coherent and related research. One might characterize the area as bringing together relevant theoretical constructs from a variety of disciplines to improve our understanding of a contemporary problem. To a large extent, the empirical study of the public understanding of science began with a 1957 national survey of American adults, sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and the Rockefeller Foundation. Stimulated by a need to better understand the size and needs of the audience for science writing, this survey of approximately 1900 US adults examined media consumption patterns generally, media consumption patterns specific to science and technology, attitudes toward scientific and technological issues, and, to a limited extent, citizen participation in the formulation of science and technology policy.’ It included only a few substantive knowledge items and those were sufficiently applied and contemporary (polio vaccine, strontium-90) to be of little use for time series measurements. Interestingly, the interviewing for the 1957 NASW study was completed only a couple of weeks prior to the launch of Sputnik I, thus providing the only available measurements of the public understanding of science and technology prior to the beginning of the era of space exploration. As a major baseline data set, many of the items from the 1957 study have been repeated in subsequent studies and are the basis of our conceptions of the rate and direction of change in the public understanding of science and technology. Fifteen years passed before the resumption of regular data collection in the United States concerning the public understanding of science and technology, and, even then, the focus was primarily on attitudes rather than understanding. Beginning in 1972, the National Science Board initiated a biennial series of reports known as Science Indicators that are transmitted to the Congress by the President as a status report on American science and technology.’ It was decided that one chapter in each of these reports would focus on public attitudes toward science and technology and a limited set of questions were commissioned in an omnibus national survey. The items focused primarily on broad general attitudes toward science and technology and a few more"