Abstract
In the last decades, science literacy has been progressively emphasised as an aim of science education. However, the science education literature does not present a consensus about both the meaning of science literacy. By studying such literature, we identified some of these aspects that may also be relevant for promoting students’ critical education. These are decision-making, critical thinking, critical positioning, and self-awareness-raising. Based on this review of the literature, our main goal has been that of discussing how these aspects could be inter-related and favour science literacy in the context of nature of science teaching. This does not mean coming up with a new ready definition for science literacy, but rather enhancing the discussion and supporting its understanding as something more complex, resulting from an intricate interaction of many components and that may be constantly promoted and developed in science lessons. Such a perspective can help teachers’ perceptions that science literacy of their students is an attainable aim, as well as encourage them to foster it.
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Notes
In this paper, following the views of Elgin (1999) and Smith & Siegel (2004), the word understanding (and correlated ones) is viewed from an holistic perspective, as opposed to a rote memorisation of facts, definitions, and categorisations. In other words, we assume that understanding involves not only defining the key concepts of a given topic and the relations among them that support explanations, but also making sense of the topic, appropriately applying it when trying to solve problems, and appreciating “at least some of the reasons that render it worth of belief” (Smith & Siegel, 2004, p. 563).
For more details about the contribution of science education to citizenship education, see Justi et al. (2022).
In this paper, we view models from the scientific perspective as “human made artefacts materialized in some way” (that is, “expressed by external representation means” (Knuutilla & Boon, 2011, p. 315)) which results in them having “many other epistemic functions besides that of representing the world” (Knuutilla, 2005, p. 18) (Gilbert & Justi, 2016, p. 23). To consider models as epistemic artefacts implies accepting their roles in supporting our imagination on how distinct entities “can be, behave, and interact with each other” (Gilbert & Justi, 2016, p. 23). This explains why we have opted for creating a model to express the outcomes of our reflections.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the sponsors (CAPES and CNPq) for the financial support. They also thank Dr. Stefannie Ibraim for the discussion of some ideas, and Izabella Martins for the technical help in producing the figure.
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This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Brazil – Finance Code 001, and by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Brazil – Projects 306638/2016–9 and 408057/2018–1.
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Almeida, B., Santos, M. & Justi, R. Aspects and Abilities of Science Literacy in the Context of Nature of Science Teaching. Sci & Educ 32, 567–587 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-022-00324-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-022-00324-4