Error in science is a prime occasion to teach the nature of science, especially the central feature of tentativeness. Error types also reflect corresponding methodologies of science, critical for practicing science and (in a context of scientific literacy) analyzing its claims. Effective efforts in teaching about error will ideally be informed by…

I profile here a prospective method for assessing nature of science (NOS) knowledge, as an alternative to VNOS and similar approaches. Questions about cases in contemporary news and from history probe scientific literacy in context. Scoring targets how "well informed" the analysis is, based on identifying relevant NOS information and interpreting…