Questionnaire Answers
Why would ¼ of the population with university education not very comfortable (scoring 3/5 or below) to interpret scientific news publications?
In Canada, under 20% of the university graduates have a degree in STEM as per Statistics Canada. As such, if the information is not provided in an accessible manner due to unfamiliarity with statistics, inexperience with critical thinking with respect to scientific reports, lack of foundational or content-specific knowledge (poor scientific literacy), the audience is unlikely to be able to confidently interpret the report.
Why would most people with a university education trust scientific reports with dramatic and opinionated language to some extent?
- Ingrained belief or self-reassurance that scientific reports are based on credible research.
- Inability to distinguish primary vs. secondary sources (lack of scientific literacy).
- Greater exposure to sensationalized reports in mainstream media (popular science).
More than half of the people with a university education would not verify new scientific claims with credible source half of the time. Why is that?
- Assumption that scientific claims are inherently credible, regardless of source.
- Inability to determine if source is primary vs. secondary.
- Lack of understanding of the inherent biases and assumptions made in different studies.
Although insignificant, why would people with a university education share scientific news articles on social media solely based on the title? What risks do you associate this behaviour with?
- Titles have been designed to attract interest (clickbait), perhaps sharing scientific news makes the individual appear intelligent.
- If an article is shared by a credible agency or people, the news has ‘acquired credibility’. Topics that are heavily politicized like climate change suffer from this misrepresentation since politicians tend to share misleading articles.
- Risks – propagation of false information, misinformation of the public, propagation of false scientific concepts that can prove to be counterproductive to progress. (e.g. the anti-vaccination movement)
The most popular resources that people reference to understand a concept are: Google (scholar), Wikipedia, NCIB, PubMed. What are your views on the credibility of these resources? Do you have any other suggestions?
From least to most, Wikipedia, Google scholar, with NCIB and PubMed being around equal. Web of Science, Scopus
It should be noted that while highly cited articles or articles from reputed journals are more credible, results should be interpreted within their scope and context. As such, if people are trying to understand a concept, a search of previous research on the topic is necessary. Ideally, most well written articles would reference such literature. There is trend of extrapolating the results and conclusions of an experiment beyond its scope.
Why do you think people with less education tend to refrain from figuring out new scientific concepts?
Some scientific concepts require layers of foundational understanding to be built upon each other, and therefore some concepts can seem intimidating and daunting to those who lack such a foundation or are not confident in it.
Although education is commonly associated with the accumulation of knowledge, education also aims to teach individuals how to learn new concepts. Perhaps those with less education have less experience with challenging themselves with new concepts, and thus may be intimidated by the thought of a steep learning curve or the amount of time that they need to put into understanding these concepts.
Also, science is a lot more nuanced than most people think. There are often conflicting theories and opinions. In those cases, it is probably better for the public to defer to the consensus of the general scientific community. Government sites and the media should work to make this information more accessible. Moreover, one of the features of science that can be cognitively dissonant for the public is the fact that science does not aim to prove things to be true but rather to prove a concept not to be false. This form of language can make an uninitiated doubt the validity of research.
Similar to the group with some post-secondary education, the group without a university degree shows similar trend in terms of trusting skeptical scientific claims and blindly distributing articles without assessments. Do you think general post-secondary education level play a significant role in scientific literacy?
From the aforementioned trend, it appears as if post-secondary education does not necessarily ensure that an individual is scientifically literate, and that it is a skill that perhaps post-secondary institutions should pay more attention to.
Also, while experience does allow you to pick up context and scientific ‘red flags’ when reading scientific articles, even veteran researchers cannot claim to be able to speak confidently on all facets of science. It is therefore the responsibility of the government, research institutions and the media to make sure that there are resources available to the public that correctly address hot topics like GMOs or human gene editing for people with different backgrounds.
