Instrument and Sample
Like in the study carried out by Lombrozo et al. (2008), the NOS instrument
(Lombrozo, personal communication, October 6, 2008) was administered to a
sample of N = 214 college students. The students were undergraduate science
majors (the vast majority of which were biology-related) at the end of a secondquarter
biology course at a large Midwestern research university in the USA. We
took this approach because we assumed that undergraduate science majors would
have more or less adequate views of NOS, thereby providing us with information
about how well the instrument performed in this capacity. The average age of undergraduates
in the sample was 21 years (minimum 19, maximum 31), 59.3% were
female, and 23.3% were minorities. The average cumulative grade point average of
the sample was 3.2 out of a possible 4.0.