How we know this, however, is the result of generating hypotheses, making observations, and conducting experiments that tested the hypotheses. All too often, science education has meant only communicating the body of knowledge. That's why so many science courses are so dull. As my colleague Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, points out, students are expected to learn more new words in the average freshman biology course than they are in a foreign language course. Worse than dull, this approach is incomplete.
Science is more than specific knowledge.
It is the process through which we validate what we know. Technological literacy has many parallels to science literacy, but the terminology is different. Technology is the body of knowledge. The process of developing technologies is engineering. To be technologically literate, school children need to understand both the process and the products of engineering.