In exploring notions of scientific literacy, Norris and Phillips (2003) argued that coming to know
science requires competency in two notions of scientific literacy. They made a distinction
between the fundamental sense of scientific literacy (reading and writing science content), and
the derived sense (being knowledgeable, learned and educated in science). They argue that
“conceptions of scientific literacy typically attend to the derived sense of literacy and not to the
fundamental sense” (p. 224). A distinction has also been made between a simple and expanded
sense of fundamental scientific literacy (i.e., decoding texts, and inferring meaning from text,
respectively) (Norris & Phillips, 1994, 2003). The investigation of students’ conceptual science
understandings in the current study represent a derived sense of scientific literacy, while their
ability to write stories about biosecurity through the transformation of scientific information is
indicative of their simple and expanded fundamental senses of scientific literacy, respectively.
In-keeping with the view of scientific literacy as citizen preparation adopted by this study,
students engaged with conceptual science understandings at a level that was appropriate in the
context of everyday conversations about science (and thus in the context of their hybridized
narratives about biosecurity). In other words, their depth of understanding was not intended to
eclipse that of practicing scientists (an unreasonable expectation, argued by some) (Sadler,
2004b).