critical thinking and scientific literacy

Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences (2016)

Chapter: 1 introduction, 1 introduction.

The work of science is complex: it is a process, a product, and an institution. As a result, engaging in science—whether using knowledge or creating it—necessitates some level of familiarity with the enterprise and practice of science; we refer to this as science literacy . Knowledge of basic science facts is but one small part of the constellation of features that can constitute science literacy. In this report, we document what is known about the components of science literacy, the contexts in which it arises and is used, the foundational literacy and numeracy skills that are prerequisite to it, and the ways in which it is applied, supported, and constrained.

Americans have an ongoing and multifaceted relationship to science. At times in the nation’s history, the shifting nature of this relationship has been marked by heightened concern about the ability of Americans to understand, participate in, appreciate, and engage with science, with various stakeholders bemoaning what they perceived to be Americans’ decreasing science literacy and worrying about the uncertain future of a citizenry they see as disengaged from or ambivalent toward science.

Despite these episodes of handwringing, the available evidence about the science literacy of the American public does not paint a universally dark picture. As contemporary understandings of science literacy have evolved, so too has the research on what Americans know about science and what they are able to do with that knowledge. This evolution has led to asking and answering questions such as: How should science literacy be defined? How can science literacy be measured? How does science literacy connect to behavior? Is there

a connection between science literacy and public support for science? These questions form the background for the committee’s study.

COMMITTEE CHARGE AND APPROACH

In response to a request from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an expert committee to examine the role of science literacy in attitudes toward and public support for science, and its relationship to health literacy and health-related behaviors. The specific statement of task for the committee is shown in Box 1-1 .

The 12-member committee included experts in several relevant disciplines and areas: science literacy, health literacy, education and learning sciences, international comparisons, survey methods and statistics, and psychometrics and attitude measurement. The committee considered existing data about science and health literacy, research on the association of science literacy with public support of science, health literacy, and behaviors related to health.

Interpreting and Addressing the Charge

A major challenge in addressing the charge is the relatively limited array of metrics available for measuring science literacy. As this report describes, the measurements available for cross-national comparisons are thoughtfully developed but limited in scope and depth. Because these assessments are administered to nationally representative samples through the use of costly and labor-intensive surveys, they must be succinct—and, as a result, have often focused on the sort of science knowledge items that can be administered quickly. But many scholars now agree that knowledge of science content falls short of fully representing the construct of science literacy as it is now understood.

In addition, although it is straightforward to document differences across nations or across ethnic groups on those content measures, explaining them is more difficult. It is clear that for some analytic purposes more information is needed—information, for example, about the level of knowledge across multiple domains of science and health, as well as knowledge about the processes scientists engage in and how science epistemology differs from other ways of knowing. The limitations of the commonly used metrics constrain the extent to which the committee can answer the specific questions posed in the charge: in the absence of richer and more complete measures of science literacy, we must often limit our conclusions to what is known about knowledge of an array of science facts and a very limited set of science processes. This report addresses these issues throughout.

Because the charge mandates that this report concern itself chiefly with science literacy, 1 it is the primary lens throughout much of this report. We have attempted as much as possible to differentiate between health literacy and science literacy when the specific point requires it, noting throughout the challenge embedded in teasing health literacy and science literacy apart.

The committee considers health literacy as an important domain that is closely related to and somewhat overlapping with science literacy, though the history and recent developments in the scholarly work on health literacy have been quite different than that on science literacy. Because NIH asked the committee to assist the agency with understanding a potential relationship between science literacy and health literacy, the committee sought research that illuminated the connection across fields: we found few studies. This lack of research made it difficult for the committee to develop an empirically driven discussion of how science literacy and health literacy overlap and how they are distinct. In

___________________

1 The committee notes that research oscillates between the terms “science literacy” and “scientific literacy.” The committee cites research and evidence throughout this report that employ both terms. The committee prefers the term “science literacy,” but uses “scientific” if specifically quoted. The committee declined to perseverate over the meaning of the specific language, given that research uses the words interchangeably to mean similar ideas.

responding to the statement of task, we use examples from the field of health literacy, as applicable, in order to highlight the overlap across the two fields.

This study was conducted on a notably short timeline of less than 1 year. In order to meet this timeline, the committee elected to address a narrow interpretation of the study charge, which reflects the specific language provided by NIH. As a result, the committee was not able to comment on many interesting and evocative topics that are relevant to the topic of science literacy. There is an unending list of both potential predictors of and consequences for science literacy, and the committee could have proceeded in any number of directions in investigating these ideas. In particular, given committee members’ expertise, the committee would have been particularly interested in examining the acquisition of science literacy through both formal and informal education. Similarly, the committee focuses on adult populations and trends in adult data throughout the report. Unfortunately, both time and the specific charge to the committee precluded delving into many topics in depth.

In addition, the committee was mindful that a companion Academies’ report on the science of science communication was under way during the time of our investigations. Though the work of the science of science communication study in no way influenced the committee’s deliberations, we chose to leave issues related specifically to science communication to that committee. Though the committee is interested in how the institutions of science communicate with the public and the consequences of those interactions, that topic, too, was deemed outside our scope given the time available, the other committee’s work, and the specific charge from NIH.

The statement of task specifically asks the committee to make “recommendations on the need to improve the understanding of science and scientific research in the United States.” The committee grappled with the underlying assumptions embedded here. Throughout this report, the committee aims to challenge traditional understandings of science literacy, and as a result we note many places at which expanding conceptions of science literacy would require further research. That is, in order to fully understand whether or not there is a need to improve the understanding of science and scientific research in the United States, it would first be necessary to solidify an evidence base that investigates science literacy in all its complexity. Again, in order to be responsive to both the charge and the study timeline, the committee did not take on the issue of how to improve science literacy, even though that issue is both important and relevant.

In addition to the specific language discussed above, the committee notes a number of places in the statement of task that reflect assumptions about both the concept of science literacy and its utility. These assumptions are particularly noteworthy in the request for the committee to consider evidence of “enhanced scientific literacy on” a list of suggested outcomes, presupposing a relationship between science literacy and those outcomes. Throughout the report, the com-

mittee attempts to identify and delineate those assumptions where appropriate while responding to the specific charge from NIH.

Reframing Science Literacy

A first task faced by the committee was to decide how to conceptualize science literacy. We reviewed many definitions and approaches to measurement, considered how those definitions and measurements have changed over time, and catalogued the many aspects of science literacy that have emerged (see Chapter 2 and Appendix A ). The committee recognizes that individuals are nested within communities that are nested within societies—and, as a result, individual literacy skills are limited or enhanced by these multiple, nested contexts. In keeping with recent literature on this issue, throughout this report the committee reflects on the ways that social structures might inform the development of an individual’s science literacy. Research on individual-level science literacy provides invaluable insights, but on its own offers an incomplete account of the nature, development, distribution, and effects of science literacy within and across communities and societies.

The committee emphasizes another important finding emerging in the literature in its use of the term science literacy in this report: a science literate society is more than the aggregation of science literate individuals. A science literate society or community is a social organization, with traits that can transcend the average knowledge or accomplishments of individuals in that society or community. 2 In light of this broad understanding of science literacy, the committee organized its work to answer the questions posed in the charge by examining evidence at three levels of science literacy: the society, the community, and the individual. We chose this organization to contrast purposefully with the default understanding of literacy only as an individual accomplishment.

FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY

The committee emphasizes that science literacy is the application of foundational literacy skills to a particular domain. Thus it is important to first consider what is meant by “literacy” when it comes with no qualifiers or modifiers. Literacy as a term and a concept has great usefulness and seemingly boundless semantic potential, such that it is used to refer to an ever-larger array of ideas, and the central concept has drifted dramatically from its original meaning. The

2 In a society, people have direct and indirect social connections; in a community, individuals are more closely connected due to shared environments and interests. A community that demonstrates science literacy, for example, might proactively coordinate to monitor whether tap water is potable or could organize to advocate for a specific environmental objective. Chapters 3 and 4 offer in-depth discussions of science literacy at the society and community levels, respectively.

origin is letra , Latin for letter, and literacy once very simply referred to the capacity to recognize letters and decode letter strings into recognizable words, along with the concomitant capacity to write words and sentences. That circumscribed meaning has long been transcended, and for the purposes of this report, the committee uses the term “foundational literacy” in reference to the set of skills and capacities described below. The committee asserts that these skills and capacities are effectively foundational to all other domains of literacy, including science literacy.

Even within the field of reading, foundational literacy has been defined in different ways in different historical periods, under different educational policies, through various assessment priorities, and for different segments of the population. The “three Rs” notion of reading that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century was relatively limited—reading mostly meant pronouncing words correctly. That limited notion has been reinforced in public education by efforts to promote grade-level reading, based on the theory that instruction that ensures accurate and fluent decoding by the end of 3rd grade will lead to later comprehension and mastery of other reading literacy challenges (learning from text, synthesizing information from multiple sources, analyzing text to infer the writer’s point of view, critiquing claims and arguments in text). In recent years, critics of this approach have argued that the emphasis on that goal in instructional and assessment practices risks diverting attention from the robust developments in reading demands that emerge after 3rd grade, which require instructional attention across the age span and across all subject domains. These demands have now been widely recognized within the reading research community (see Goldman and Snow, 2015 ).

Even the most conservative of foundational literacy researchers now incorporate a range of extra-textual skills into their notions of literacy. Foundational literacy is commonly extended to include processing words and language in oral contexts, using academic vocabulary and language structures, and having the knowledge base required for comprehension of nontechnical texts about such topics as politics, popular culture, history, art, music, and science. In addition, research on foundational literacy, based as it is in the field of education, has traditionally operated in parallel with research on foundational numeracy, rather than emphasizing the connections between literacy and numeracy. However, this committee asserts that numeracy, defined as the ability to understand probabilistic and mathematical concepts ( Peters, 2012 ), is indeed foundational to other domains of literacy, especially science literacy. Because mathematics represents ideas and concepts in ways that language alone cannot, the committee includes numeracy as part of foundational literacy for the purposes of this report.

All other domains of literacy thus depend on foundational literacy. For science literacy, the production or consumption of science knowledge depends on the ability to access text, construct meaning, and evaluate newly encountered

information in the specific domain of science. But the application of the term “literacy” to a specific domain does more than just signify that foundational literacy skills are necessary to understanding the domain itself: it also signifies something like “knowledge, skills, and fluency” within that particular domain. New forms of domain literacy emerge when an individual or group attempts to identify some particular knowledge or competencies as socially important. In other words, framing a domain as an important “literacy” (i.e., media literacy, technology literacy, financial literacy) 3 has become a way of arguing for the importance of ensuring that individuals can access and use the ideas in that particular domain. Not all domain literacies have been the subject of concerted scholarly attention, though, and it is here that science literacy and health literacy stand out: science literacy and health literacy have both emerged as important research arenas, with consequences for policy in a number of contexts.

Finally, the committee notes an important point about the relationship between science literacy and many other domain literacies (in this case, health literacy): health literacy is closely related and somewhat overlapping with science literacy. Science content areas, such as biology or chemistry, are necessary for understanding basic health concepts, and as a result, some science literacy is essential for the knowledge, skills, and fluency necessary to be health literate. As noted above, however, there is relatively little empirical work explaining these relationships, thus limiting the committee’s ability to deal in detail with this issue.

EQUITY AND SCIENCE LITERACY

As noted above, the value of science literacy and health literacy—their usefulness and importance to people, communities, and society—is an explicit focus of this report. In order to undergird the committee’s arguments about how science literacy and health literacy operate differently in different contexts, it is necessary to raise, at the outset, a critical point about the role of science literacy and health literacy in society: they reflect deep structural inequities in the United States.

Individuals with fewer economic resources and less access to high-quality education have fewer opportunities to develop science literacy and health literacy. This lack of access disproportionately affects some demographic groups: second-language speakers of English, Latinos, black Americans, and children growing up in low-income families or attending under-resourced schools may have fewer opportunities to acquire science literacy (see Chapter 3 ). Moreover, this inequitable distribution is of particular concern with regard to health

3 See, for example, http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/aspen-institute-report-national-leadership-conference-media-literacy and http://www.mymoney.gov/researcher/Pages/forresearchers.aspx [July 2016].

( Institute of Medicine, 2004 ). There is strong evidence that health literacy is associated with access to health resources, so those with less opportunity to develop health literacy may as a consequence also experience poorer health care and poorer health outcomes than people with more opportunity to develop health literacy.

At the same time, research from the field of health literacy shows that it would be entirely too simplistic to ascribe poor health outcomes among certain groups exclusively to limitations of an individual’s health literacy ( Institute of Medicine, 2012 ). For example, living in a food desert impairs the ability of an individual to gain access to healthy food, regardless of how much they know about the importance of vegetables. Individuals with diabetes may fully understand the mechanisms underlying the disease, but if they are unable to afford regular monitoring of their condition, they are more likely to become sick. In these cases and others, these “undesirable” outcomes cannot be attributed to an individual’s deficit of health literacy. Social factors may explain much more of the variability in outcomes than individual levels of health literacy or science literacy. As a result, the committee chooses to emphasize how social factors constrain (or promote) how health literacy and science literacy are expressed at each level of society.

STUDY METHODS

The committee held four in-person meetings and one telephone meeting over the course of the study. The first two were largely information-gathering meetings at which we heard from a variety of stakeholders, including Carrie Wolinetz from NIH’s Office of Science Policy, as well as several professional academics with relevant expertise. Jon Miller from the University of Michigan, Dan Kahan from Yale Law School, and Philip Kitcher from Columbia University addressed the committee at its first open session, each speaking to different facets of research on science literacy. At the second open session, Dietram Scheufele from the University of Wisconsin–Madison fielded questions on science communication. Ellen Peters from Ohio State University discussed numeracy. John Durant from the MIT museum, and Larry Bell from the Museum of Science–Boston formed a panel on the role of informal learning institutions in addressing issues around science literacy.

Following those information-gathering meetings, the committee conducted its work in closed session to analyze evidence and formulate conclusions and recommendations. The committee reviewed multiple sources of information in order to consider how science literacy and health literacy may be defined and measured, as well as the relationship between science literacy and the outcomes articulated in the charge.

Multiple fields of research informed the committee’s work. Notably, literatures from science communication and science education were considered,

as these fields have both proceeded, often in parallel, in attempting to codify what is considered science literacy. Literature from the sociology of science also supported this work. In order to address the health-related components of the charge, the committee reviewed research from the field of health literacy. Literature from psychometrics was considered in order to best synthesize the role of attitude measurement in assessing the potential effects of enhancing science literacy.

The committee also commissioned four supplementary papers intended to support the writing of this report. 4 Lauren McCormack, director for the Center of Communication Science at RTI International, provided a paper on the ways in which health literacy is assessed and measured. Michael Cacciatore, assistant professor of public relations at the University of Georgia, reviewed literature on the role of science literacy in public support for and attitudes toward science and science research. Jon Miller, who spoke to the committee at its first open session, provided a paper on traditional measures of science literacy. Arthur Lupia, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, wrote a paper on science literacy and civic engagement. These papers helped supplement the committee’s expertise in order to effectively address the study’s statement of task.

The committee expects that this report will be important to a number of groups beyond the study’s sponsor. We anticipate that the primary audience for this report will be the science literacy research community, along with science communication practitioners. Science educators (both formal and informal) may be particularly concerned with the committee’s discussions about how social structures both constrain and enable the development of science literacy, while policy makers interested in public support for science are likely to find the discussion of the relationship between science knowledge and attitudes toward science informative.

ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT

The report is organized into six chapters, with two appendices. Following this introduction, Chapter 2 details the history of how science literacy and health literacy have been defined and measured, taking care to note the differences in how the fields of science literacy and health literacy have developed.

Chapter 3 considers science literacy at the society level by summarizing the claims that have been made about how increased science literacy affects societies, considering the role of social structures in science literacy. It also examines how issues at the societal level may constrain science literacy at the community

4 All commissioned papers may be viewed upon request via the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s public access file. Jon Miller’s paper is also available at this report’s National Academies Press website.

and individual levels, and it addresses international comparisons on measures of science literacy.

Chapter 4 examines how communities develop and use health literacy and science literacy and how enhanced literacy in communities may be mobilized to achieve local goals.

Chapter 5 looks at science literacy and health literacy at the individual level, considering how enhanced science and health literacy might affect people: Does it make people more supportive of science? Does it make them better able to use scientific information?

The final chapter offers the committee’s recommendations for the field and identifies areas in which new measures and new research inquiries might improve what is known about science literacy and its relationship to support for and use of science and research.

Appendix A presents a table of key definitions and statements about literacy, numeracy, science literacy, health literacy, and health numeracy. Appendix B contains biographical sketches of committee members and staff.

Science is a way of knowing about the world. At once a process, a product, and an institution, science enables people to both engage in the construction of new knowledge as well as use information to achieve desired ends. Access to science—whether using knowledge or creating it—necessitates some level of familiarity with the enterprise and practice of science: we refer to this as science literacy.

Science literacy is desirable not only for individuals, but also for the health and well- being of communities and society. More than just basic knowledge of science facts, contemporary definitions of science literacy have expanded to include understandings of scientific processes and practices, familiarity with how science and scientists work, a capacity to weigh and evaluate the products of science, and an ability to engage in civic decisions about the value of science. Although science literacy has traditionally been seen as the responsibility of individuals, individuals are nested within communities that are nested within societies—and, as a result, individual science literacy is limited or enhanced by the circumstances of that nesting.

Science Literacy studies the role of science literacy in public support of science. This report synthesizes the available research literature on science literacy, makes recommendations on the need to improve the understanding of science and scientific research in the United States, and considers the relationship between scientific literacy and support for and use of science and research.

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Scientific Literacy and Social Transformation

Liliana valladares.

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, México

Associated Data

Not applicable.

The paper provides a systematic theoretical analysis of the main visions of the concept of scientific literacy developed in the last 20 years. It is described as a transition from a transmissive educational vision of scientific literacy (Vision-I) to a transformative vision (Vision-III), with a stronger engagement with social participation and emancipation. Using conceptual tools from sociology and the philosophy of education, the notions of science participation and emancipation associated with transformative Vision-III are critically analyzed in order to draw attention to the growing need to define them with greater accuracy as key conceptual components of scientific literacy. Without such an approach, it will be difficult for science education to materialize and consolidate educational actions that are pedagogically sound, culturally and socially sensitive, and coherent with the social transformation of the diverse conditions of oppression. It is concluded that Vision-III should include both a broad conception of participation, which makes visible the invisible and informal acts performed by diverse groups to build society, and an alternative notion of emancipation committed to liberation.

Introduction

The recent crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous inequalities, gaps, and vulnerabilities in education. At the same time, it highlighted a range of possibilities and projections for shaping an improved education, one more suitable for global challenges. UNESCO ( 2020 ) presented nine big ideas to build the foundations of this post-pandemic education. One of these ideas raises the need to: “…Ensure scientific literacy within the curriculum. This is the right time for deep reflection on curriculum, particularly as we struggle against the denial of scientific knowledge and actively fight misinformation…” (UNESCO, 2020 , p. 6).

The growing reaction of some citizens and political leaders, denying scientific knowledge about socio-scientific issues of planetary relevance, such as climate change or even the coronavirus pandemic, together with the diversity and multiplication of fake news and unreliable sources of information regarding the techno-scientific risks to which we are exposed daily, has served as an alert to reactivate the global commitment to scientific literacy (Orozco, 2020 ; Nguyen and Catalan-Matamoros, 2020 ). This revival of science and technology in formal, informal, and non-formal educational settings makes it urgent to recover the question of why a scientific literacy is important and what is the meaning that this concept should have.

In general terms, the meaning of scientific literacy has changed throughout history and many definitions of this concept have been developed, which have basically migrated from a scientific teaching focused on the memorization of scientific concepts and laws, towards a scientific teaching focused on the study of its risks and impacts on society and, more recently, on the role of science as a tool for social change. Regarding the social function of scientific literacy, in sum, this has been located around three main orientations (Liu, 2009 , 2013 ): as (1) the elimination of a cognitive deficit; (2) the acquisition of a personal commodity; and (3) a one-way transport towards a more valuable social end.

In the first case, when the term scientific literacy refers to a deficit elimination, it is assumed that students or the general public are illiterate in science and that this deficiency needs to be corrected, regardless the various types of knowledge and experiences people have regarding the natural world and without necessarily considering the context in which it is inserted. When scientific literacy is treated as the acquisition of a commodity, it is often assumed that once a student has achieved a certain result associated with science education and has crossed the threshold between what is considered literate and illiterate in science, this person has obtained an asset that will last forever, no matter what field of science he or she has managed to cross this threshold in, and ignoring both the dynamism of science and that learning is an endless and lifelong process. Finally, when scientific literacy is conceived as a one-way transport, it is understood as a carrier of different benefits, that is, the means that transport a society from a state of lesser to a state of greater knowledge and well-being, like, for example, when it is expected that scientific literacy is a tool for economic development and national security (Liu, 2009 , 2013 ).

What kind of orientation should we aim for to guarantee a scientific literacy suitable for the challenges of the twenty-first century? Answering this question is neither simple nor trivial; all definitions have a scope and limitations and the picture becomes even more complex when we see the multiple typologies that have been generated in the specialized literature and that have sought to establish a clear definition of what scientific literacy actually is and what it should be.

This article is based on a documentary analysis that systematizes some of the main visions and meanings of scientific literacy. It describes how this concept has moved from a transmissive vision of the educational process, focused on the unilateral transmission of scientific knowledge and without a clear link to the social dimensions of science (Vision-I), towards a socio-cultural and situated vision of the educational process (Vision-II), and, finally, to a transformative vision committed to participation and emancipation (Vision-III). This last one prevails in most of the recent studies on the research field in science education, in which it is emphasized that a scientific literacy for the twenty-first century should aim towards social activism.

Social activism in Vision-III is proposed as a response to the disturbing issues we—the whole of humanity—are facing. Undoubtedly, we are experiencing a strong security crisis and we are dealing with different forms of violence and systematic violations of human rights that are intertwined in a global context characterized by a political and environmental crisis that could be synthesized in challenges such as climate change, increasing mass migrations, the excessive circulation of misinformation—fake news—and the massification of digital technologies. Moreover, one could add a global context full of catastrophic global risks, among which we should mention the recent pandemic produced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The COVID-19 pandemic has evidenced how all human relationships are burdened with injustice, economic and cultural fragility, and social inequality. In the same way, the pandemic has made visible how day by day these gaps widen and the conflicts between countries are escalating and how, paradoxically, all these divides advance along with an unprecedented techno-scientific development, which raise doubts about their own ethical limits, given the possibility of creating new transhuman and post-human species; this scientific progress is capable of profoundly redefining the relationships between nature, culture, and human beings, but has shown to be unable to include all people equally in the benefits of science and technology.

This set of social problems is configured by, at the same time it configures, chaotic, turbulent, and changing environments that are accelerated by globalization, leading us towards to what is known as the VUCA world. VUCA is an acronym that refers to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014 ) that characterize current social, ecological, political, and economic systems that make the twenty-first century increasingly more and more difficult to precede and manage. Coping with these challenges requires a flexible scientific literacy, committed to social transformation. In the context of this article, social transformation refers to social change and rupture of the distinct oppression structures (based on racism, sexism, classism); it means the transformation of the historical, ideological, institutional set of policies, practices, traditions, norms, and discourses which, based on prejudice, discrimination, and differential power, work to systematically exploit and exclude different social groups (minoritized, dominated) for the benefit of other social groups (dominant) (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017 ).

In order to change the systemic injustice that keeps certain groups excluded from the benefits of scientific-technological development, requires a trans- and interdisciplinary approach. On the one hand, an interdisciplinary approach enables two or more disciplines to interact in order to allow for an object of study to be described, analyzed, and understood in all its complexity through collaboration, synergy, and disciplinary integration, which may consist of the transfer or appropriation of concepts, values, and methods from one discipline to another. On the other hand, a transdisciplinary approach contributes to shaping much more systemic, global, and multidimensional visions of an object through a complex knowledge process that exceeds disciplinary limits.

A comprehensive understanding of scientific literacy, which encompasses all its complexity and dimensions, requires at least the interdisciplinary interrelation of various fields of study. Otherwise, bringing ideas from a single discipline to conceptualize scientific literacy could result in a fragmented and limited vision of the concept, without attaining a unified vision that integrates and facilitates moving towards new epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies in the field of science education.

Hence, reviewing some categories developed by the philosophy of education, for example, would allow us to clarify and justify the why of the different educational practices of science, as well as to solve fundamental questions about the ultimate ends of human being, society, culture and science, their relationship with the aims of education, and the principles on which certain pedagogical practices are designed and constructed. Similarly, through a sociological view, interdisciplinarily articulated with the philosophy of education, we would be able to analyze the structural logics that condition the social and educational practices, understanding the different ways in which society is conceptualized, historizing the inequalities and diversities that most of the times are assumed as natural; with the sociological approach, we would be also able to de-essentialize and de-substantialize the social problems that are manifested and reflected in the science classroom, and which often determine the students’ educational success.

To change society by means of science education, it is important first to understand what features of society we want to modify and why. This necessarily implies knowing how society is structured, how it works, and what place education, culture, and science education occupy in said social structure. The same can be done by interrelating the contributions of other disciplines—such as history, economics, or the politics of education—to highlight some of the disciplines whose participation is necessary to configure a broad and critical concept of scientific literacy.

In this article, I expect to encourage this interdisciplinary conformation of a broad notion of scientific literacy, taking some contributions from sociology and philosophy of education as analytical tools, which allow to analyze the notions of “participation” and “emancipation,” which are strongly associated with the transformative vision of scientific literacy (Vision-III). I explore only these two notions from the point of view of two disciplines, because I consider these sufficient to exemplify the potential that an interdisciplinary reflection would have in the critical reconceptualization of the different components that make up scientific literacy. Although this analysis does not delve exhaustively into the interdisciplinary construction of the concept of scientific literacy, it does illustrate how the analytical tools taken from different disciplines can contribute to refine this concept. I have chosen to work with these two notions because of the strategic role they have in the transformative vision of scientific literacy, so the title has been referred to as critical notes on participation and emancipation. Their key role becomes evident when the main trajectories and conceptual changes on science education over time are described in the first sections of this paper, showing the urgency of a critical approach to the meanings of scientific literacy’s components.

The critical character of the notes that are developed in this text refers to the relevance for the science education field of paying attention to the need to pause for a moment and to elaborate a conceptual analysis of the notions of science participation and emancipation implied in the literacy process, and to underscore that these notions have multiple interpretations (sociological, political, philosophical, historical, etc.) that are not visible to the naked eye. As it is referred by Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ), the term “critical” is a qualifier that means “… criticizing, rejecting and/or trying to fix the social problems that emerge in situations of social injustice…” (p. 39), because it is only through the task of uncovering the injustices behind social inequalities that it becomes possible to “… imagine alternatives, and/or propose viable action strategies for change…” (Collins & Bilge, 2016 , p. 40). So, given the exclusions and oppressions that take place in diverse educational contexts, there is an urgent need for a commitment to those definitions about participation and emancipation that have an engagement with either unmasking hierarchical and asymmetrical relations of power and with the transformative character produced by participation and emancipation in science education for reordering and fixing social relations in science school and society. In other words, the brief conceptual review that is presented in this paper maintains a critical stance in the sense that it defends the need to expose how the concepts of science participation and emancipation are intersected by the axis of power, by relationships of inequality (social, cultural, economic), domination, and social exploitation, which are manifested in diverse forms, combinations, and complexities, across different processes and practices of scientific literacy. These are critical notes as they explore, conceptually, the historical and practical possibilities of a transformation of educational realities in the context of science education, letting the reader figure out alternatives for educational research and change in this field.

Specifically, what makes these notes “critical” is, therefore, their affiliation to the main two principles through which Gottesman ( 2016 ) characterizes all critical thinking in education: (i) the principle of relationality, that is, to assume that educational practices and institutions along with social and cultural relations need to be seen as intimately connected to the inequalities that structure modern societies, seeking all the time to transform them, and (ii) the principle of repositioning, which refers to the commitment and interest of those educational investigations that look for an understanding of educational actions developed from the point of view of the connections among the many dimensions of society as a whole, as well as from the point of view of the dispossessed and disadvantaged ones, for transforming and acting against the ideological and institutional processes that reproduce and perpetuate the conditions of oppression. In this sense, these notes share the aspiration of the critical thinking in education to broaden the conceptual scope to which Vision-III of scientific literacy invites us, offering a couple of theoretical-methodological elements, such as intersectionality in participation and emancipation as disidentification, which both underpin and demand a transformation of social structures, institutions, and relationships towards societies in which major conditions of plurality, symmetry, equity and equality, and mainly social and educational justice prevail.

This paper is organized as follows: Section  2 reviews the fundamental and derived meanings of the concept of scientific literacy in order to show one of the first changes that this concept underwent and that describes how this literacy overcame to be limited to reading and writing scientific texts, spreading its scope towards the social field, adding a derived sense that included the development of multiple skills associated with the role of science in society. Simultaneously to the change in the fundamental sense of scientific literacy, the notions of participation and emancipation will later emerge as key components of the derived sense of the concept.

Given the myriad of conceptions that derived sense brought with it, in Section  3 Visions-I and -II are described as conceptual strategies that help to map, organize, and synthesize the explosion of multiple conceptions about scientific literacy. Later, in Section  4 , the transformative view of scientific literacy is presented as a broader and more critical elaboration than those offered by Vision-I and -II. In this section, emancipation and participation are explicitly introduced as core components of a scientific literacy oriented towards social transformation. Although incorporating these two components in the field of science teaching has been a very important step in the historical development of the concept, because it shows a close co-constitutive relationship between science, society, and science education, Section  5 discusses how both notions, participation and emancipation, require conceptual precisions, since they are lived and experienced differently and unequally according to variables like class, ethnicity, and gender of those who enroll in a science education process, so it is necessary to explore the deeper meanings of these two conceptual components. In this way, in Section  5.1 , a brief analysis of the meaning of science participation from an intersectional perspective is carried out, and in Section  5.2 , an analysis of emancipation from a philosophical perspective is developed.

By deepening into the meanings of both terms, the intention is to account for the urgency and richness of taking categories discussed in the philosophy and sociology of education to define a scientific literacy in a way that is more compatible with the diversity of conflicted, cultural, and social experiences in which students and teachers are inserted; thus, the intent is to be more in line with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity associated with the challenges of the twenty-first century. This critical contribution has the ultimate purpose of claiming that the pretensions to universalize and simplify the character of scientific literacy entail the risks of, on the one hand, underestimating some conceptual precisions that are necessary to design and materialize educational actions which are pedagogically sound, and directed towards the social transformation proposed in Vision-III, and, on the other hand, of turning this concept into the opposite of its transformative purpose, that is, into a concept that, instead of strengthening students’ participation and emancipation, contributes to the reproduction of socioeducational dependencies and cultural exclusions in the field of science.

The Fundamental and the Derived Sense of Scientific Literacy

The term “scientific literacy” originated in the 1950s to express a set of goals for science education (Bybee, 2016 ; Choi et al. 2011 ). During the 1990s, with the circulation of educational reform documents in the USA and other countries, scientific literacy became the most important goal of science education. Although many efforts were made to define it, today there is no universally accepted definition of this concept (Liu, 2013 ).

Roughly, this literacy could be defined as “being educated and possessing knowledge in and about science” (Norris & Phillips, 2016 , p. 947). However, this definition could become more complex and give rise to large and specific categories that show the multivariate nature of elements contained in scientific literacy. That is the case of the contributions of Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ), who organized the multiple definitions of this concept in two senses: the fundamental and the derived sense.

Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ) identified that scientific literacy is most often used to refer to one of the following aspects: knowledge of the substantive content of science and the ability to distinguish what is and what is not science; understanding of science and its applications; ability to think scientifically; ability to use scientific knowledge in problem solving; knowledge needed to participate in socio-scientific issues; understanding of the nature of science and its relationships with culture; assessment of the benefits and risks of science; ability to think critically about science and deal with scientific expertise.

Given this multiplicity of conceptions, and since they frequently comprise a multidimensional set of diverse elements to assess what it means to be scientifically literate, Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ) underscore the importance of distinguishing between a fundamental sense and a derived sense of this term. According to them, most of the conceptions found in literature appeal to the derived sense, forgetting its fundamental sense.

In their approach, Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ) refer to the most basic meaning of “literacy” as the ability to read and write, and they differentiate it from a derived sense that understands this term as knowledge, learning and education. A person can have knowledge about something, as Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ) point out, “…without being able to read and write…” (p. 224), but when it refers to a disciplinary body of knowledge, such as science, the connection between specialized knowledge and the ability to read and write is closer, even more when it is acknowledged that scientific practices are predominantly textual, to such an extent that it is impossible to know science without reading, writing, and exchanging scientific texts. It implies that the fundamental sense of literacy should also be the fundamental meaning of scientific literacy, and yet it is precisely the most absent sense in the literature (Norris & Phillips, 2003 ).

Certainly, it is not easy to find a definition of scientific literacy that recovers this fundamental sense. This neglect of including the reading and writing of scientific texts as a basic definition of scientific literacy is also reflected in the educational practice of school science that usually underestimates the importance of the fact that “…scientists create, share and negotiate the meanings of inscriptions: notes, reports, tables, graphs, drawings, diagrams…” (Norris & Phillips, 2003 , p. 225). Through texts, scientists present and represent data; elaborate and communicate hypotheses, models, theories, arguments; codify and systematize the productions of other scientists; re-examine ideas published within and outside their field, among others.

According to Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ), reading and writing are not only communicative or storage tools of science, which implies science could therefore be extracted from them; these activities are also constitutive of science practices, and without them there is no science as such, neither inside nor outside the school. Following these authors, we should overcome the traditional belief that reading and writing are passive activities and not very significant for the learning of science, and give rise to proposals of academic literacies that reclaim the relevance of scientific texts as science’s fundamental pieces. As Norris and Phillips ( 2003 p. 236) argue: “…Nobody can acquire a sophisticated level of scientific knowledge without being literate in the fundamental sense, and science itself could never exist without individuals literate in this way…”.

However, this fundamental sense has been blurred and scientific literacy is usually defined only by its derived sense. According to Bybee ( 2016 ), outside of the boundaries of learning to read and write, scientific literacy is referred to as the understanding of science and its applications in the individual and citizen experiences, and it goes back to 1958, with P.D. Hurd’s contributions, who figured out what is perhaps one of the first definitions that link science curricula and educational resources to provide students with opportunities to appreciate science as a human and intellectual achievement; to use scientific methods and to apply science to the social, economic, political, and personal domains (Bybee, 2016 ).

Among the many attempts to describe the derived sense of scientific literacy and to systematize its elements (DeBoer, 2000 ), the effort by Choi et al. ( 2011 ) is relevant. Based on a deep documentary review and a wide set of opinions from science teachers form different levels, Choi et al. ( 2011 ) outlined a scientific literacy definition for the twenty-first century, made up of five dimensions: (i) Scientific contents; (ii) mental habits (communication and collaboration, systematic thinking, information management, use of evidence and argumentation); (iii) character and values to act responsibly; (iv) science as an activity (its epistemology and its relations with society); (v) metacognition and self-direction (self-management and self-evaluation).

This is perhaps the most exhaustive definition to date of the derived sense from the concept, both because of the diversity of elements it contains, and because of the participatory methodology with which it was constructed, reminding us that the concept should also be meaningful to all those agents who participate in the literacy process (teachers, but also students, science education researchers, decision makers on educational and scientific policy, and the general public).

Another remarkable effort to understand the derived sense is Roberts ( 2007 ), who not only achieved to place scientific literacy on the international agenda of educational policies, but also organized the multiple conceptions into two main visions. More recently and based on Robert’s contribution, a third vision of scientific literacy has been developed to summarize the current understanding of the concept.

The distinction between the fundamental and derived senses of scientific literacy represent one of the first steps that enabled overcoming a narrow vision of science in the school context, based on the idea that learning science is only acquiring skills to read, write, and handle scientific information. The result was an explosion of multiple definitions, many of them listings of competences that tried to condense the derived sense of scientific literacy; this derived sense allowed to relate science learning with the gradual development of a set of different skills associated with the scientific activities and their historical, social, cultural, political, and environmental implications.

Vision-I and Vision-II of Scientific Literacy

According to Roberts ( 2007 ), and in parallel with the two modes of scientific knowledge production developed by Gibbons et al. ( 1997 ), there are two main views of scientific literacy that can be distinguished, and which encompass almost all definitions of this term (Bybee, 2016 ; Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 ). These visions make up a continuum and are recurrently cited because they help to map, organize, and conceptualize the diversity of conceptions about this term (Liu, 2013 ). Following Roberts ( 2007 ), while the so-called Vision-I is rooted in the products and processes of science, Vision-II is anchored in social situations with a scientific component, which students will face as citizens.

Vision-I focuses on the learning of scientific contents and processes for their subsequent application (Bybee, 2016 ); it emphasizes science as a discipline that demands propositional and procedural knowledge, metacognition, and disposition (Liu, 2013 ). This orientation is linked to what Aikenhead ( 2006 ) called “science to prepare future scientists.” Vision-II includes the scientific literacy definitions focused on understanding the usefulness of scientific knowledge in life and society, and on fostering its learning from meaningful contexts (Bybee, 2016 ), contextualizing it and relating it to technology, environment, and society (Liu, 2013 ). This orientation is identified with the Aikenhead ( 2006 ) orientation of “science for all.” This second vision adopts a socio-cultural perspective of teaching and learning and recognizes that science is not only an isolated content, but also involves a context of cultural connotations (values, beliefs, emotions) related both to the social and individual life of students, and to the historical, philosophical, and socio-cultural dimensions of science. Vision-II is developed as a product of what Mansour and Wegerif ( 2013 ) called the “socio-cultural turn in science education,” in which the decontextualization of knowledge that characterizes Vision-I is questioned. This socio-cultural turn incorporates science into a context of cultural practices and interests that demand attention from the school; schools could no longer remain blind to the students’ culture and were now required to understand personal/collective students’ ideas about science.

Each vision gives rise to very different curricular proposals, strategies, and instructional resources, as well as different evaluative designs, roles, and strategies for teacher training (Bybee, 2016 ). For example, while Vision-I is present in the TIMSS-OECD assessments, with textbook questions without context, Vision-II is present in type PISA evaluations designs, characterized by contextualizing their items (Bybee, 2016 ; Liu, 2013 ).

Roberts’ two visions represent an effort to synthesize the multivocity of scientific literacy that was the result, to a large extent, of the theoretical development of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies and social theory, which enriched the reflection on the effects of scientific and technological activities on societies, showing the need to contextualize scientific practices. As STS studies and social theories about science in general became more complex, so did the visions of scientific literacy. These two visions are a mirror reflection of the contrast between a positivist image of science isolated from the society, whose teaching practices were focused on achieving the canonical concepts of science (Vision-I), and a postpositivist science, linked to society, whose teaching practices changed focuses on the technological and social context in which science is developed (Vision-II).

However, as STS studies gradually advanced, they started to explore the ways in which science and technology co-constitute the world, the objects, the values, the institutions, and in short, all society and culture—and vice versa—so it became evident that in the science education field, it was necessary to take another step in the relationship between science and society. When STS studies explained how society and culture are co-constructed by science, this co-construction of science and society demanded a new vision of scientific literacy. As a response, since the last decade, a third orientation has been added to these two visions—Vision-III—which is the result of the contributions and reflections of Santos ( 2009 ), Yore ( 2012 ), and Liu ( 2013 ).

A Transformative Vision of Scientific Literacy

Vision-III expands the conceptual scope of scientific literacy developed in Vision-II, and assumes school science beyond its social contextualization, as involving a greater social engagement and citizen impact (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 ).

This new vision integrates three innovative aspects: 4.1: a fusion of the fundamental and derived senses of scientific literacy (Yore, 2012 ); 4.2: an introduction of the notions of science engagement and participation (Liu, 2013 ); and 4.3: the inclusion of a political and emancipatory agenda aligned with values such as equity and social justice (Santos, 2009 ).

Together, these three aspects make Vision-III more in line with the challenges of the twenty-first century, because in order to transform human relationships and consequently the different systems of injustice, economic, cultural, and social gaps, and to change the growing expressions of hate and violence towards certain social groups as well as to stop the exacerbation of environmental crisis, it is not enough to contextualize science and reflect on its multiple risks and impacts, but rather a different orientation of science education and a set of skills that promote greater social activism and individual and collective agency are required. That is, science education should not settle for teaching practices focused on reading and writing scientific texts but should promote a more disruptive literacy based on the use of scientific content and the critical thinking characteristics of science. This new vision should permit a better search for the comprehensive understanding of complex and long-term processes we are facing in the VUCA world, so in this way, science education could foster a more equitable distribution of the benefits of science to build more global resilience, projecting new anti-oppressive and more supportive and sustainable social relationships, not only among human beings, but also between them and the environment.

Fusion of the Fundamental and Derived Senses

Yore ( 2012 ) considers that the two senses initially differentiated by Norris and Phillips ( 2003 ) are separated in Visions-I and -II of scientific literacy and proposes to merge them to constitute a Vision-III.

Vision-III is an additive socio-cognitive scheme composed of two sets of knowledge and skills about science: on the one hand, those related to the fundamental sense of being a science-literate person, which includes cognitive skills—such as critical thinking—and metacognitive, affective, communicative, and technological capacities; on the other hand, those related to the derived sense of scientific literacy, that is, knowledge about science and scientific practices, its relations with society, technology and environment, an understanding of natural events, and the big ideas and unifying concepts of science, which allow for a greater participation and science engagement in a social context.

Science Engagement and Participation

According to Liu ( 2013 ), a significant change in the orientation of scientific literacy and its humanization requires a new vision that goes beyond Visions-I and -II, and it should be characterized by what is called a “science engagement” since: “… the understanding of science as well as its relations with technology and society by individuals is not enough; active participation and dialogue among all citizens on complex issues are needed…” (Liu, 2013 p. 27).

Science engagement, in Liu’s perspective, refers to promoting active participation in the public debate around science and the search for solutions to relevant socio-scientific issues that the world is facing today, emphasizing the multidimensionality of science. Liu ( 2013 ) assumes that, with the idea of science engagement, Vision-III preserves all the conceptual benefits gained by Vision-II (i.e., contextualizing science), but also are summed up by another conceptual advantages as the closing of the gap between the two cultures (the scientific and the humanistic, in the first place, but also between rich and poor, East–West, science-technology, among others).

Science engagement is both “…a state and a lifelong process…” (Liu, 2013 , p. 36) that develops throughout life, and that can be expressed and measured gradually at levels or domains which are defined differently according to diverse typologies that conceive scientific literacy as a gradual, measurable, and discretionary concept.

Hodson’s typology (1999; 2003 ), for example, identifies four levels of mastery in scientific literacy: level 1, in which it is possible to understand and learn science and technology conceptually; level 2, in which it is possible to learn about science and technology, its nature and relations with particular interests along with the different forms of distribution of wealth and power; level 3, in which it is possible to do and practice science and technology; level 4, in which a science engagement is consolidated and expressed in socio-political actions. Vision-III aims to reach level 4, that of greater science engagement, manifested as an activist and transformative education (Bencze, 2017 ; Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 ). Other typologies that classify the science literacy process according to the level of science engagement are those of Shen ( 1975 ) and Shamos ( 1995 ).

The different degrees of science engagement among the three visions also reconfigures the role of students in scientific literacy. While in Vision-I students engage in science for developing their intellectual capacity and for preparation of a science career, that is, they are “pure science learners” (Liu, 2013 , p. 29), in Vision-II, they engage in science for solving technological and societal problems, as “science advocates” (Liu, 2013 , p. 29). In contrast, in Vision-III, students seek the best-informed solutions to complex social, cultural, political, and environmental issues as “honest brokers” (Liu, 2013 , p. 29), expanding the range of options for decision makers.

Science engagement also means addressing science ethically. Vision-III encourages the debates about science benefits and risks and analyzes the possibilities of its fair distribution and sustainable use (Santos, 2009 ). This feature makes Vision-III correspond greatly with the SSI (socio-scientific issues) approach (Sadler & Dawson, 2012 ; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009 ), perhaps the most popular proposal in STS education (Pedretti & Nazir, 2011 ), oriented to cultivating the humanistic aspects of science and students’ character formation as future global citizens (Lee et al. 2013 ; Zeidler et al. 2019 ).

Regarding the relationship between the notions of participation and emancipation, it could be stated that, although they are both diffuse and buzzwords, participation is, generally, one of the key indicators of the level of science engagement (DeWitt & Archer, 2017 ). A higher participation in some social, educational, or cultural process will almost always correspond to a maximum level of engagement (Montero, 2004 ), while a marginal participation will correspond to a lower or no engagement. As Fredricks et al. ( 2004 ) argue: “…participation at the upper levels indicates a qualitative difference in engagement in terms of greater commitment…” (p. 62). This means that both terms can be treated as interchangeable concepts; however, they are not the same: engagement is a more comprehensive concept than participation, and its conceptual treatment requires greater complexity, which for the purposes of this article is unnecessary, since working with the notion of participation is sufficient as a reflection or indicator of a greater or lesser science engagement (DeWitt & Archer, 2017 ). Based on the contribution on school engagement elaborated by Fredricks et al. ( 2004 ), authors such as Woods-McConney et al. ( 2014 ) and Grabau and Ma ( 2017 ) suggested that science engagement is a multidimensional concept that comprises, at least, three components: (a) the behavioral, which refers to participation in science or science-related activities, both formally and informally; (b) the emotional, which embraces (positive or negative) affective responses to science, but also attitudes in science, including interest, boredom, happiness, sadness, and anxiety; (c) the cognitive, related to the extent to which students are willing to develop science concepts and skills, their motivation, self-regulation, and their interest and investment in learning and schooling. Science participation is therefore only one of the science engagement components (Woods-McConney et al., 2014 ), related to “…how individuals become involved in something or with someone, such as science/scientist…” (Wong, 2016 , p. 117); this notion has a behavioral nature, implying the activation of particular actions, mainly the action of taking part in science, either as an individual or as a part of a community (Bee & Kaya, 2017 ), within and beyond the context of the school (DeWitt & Archer, 2017 ).

Science engagement involves taking more risks, greater spontaneity, motivation, and creative action (Hoffman et al., 2005 ) with the processes of generation, distribution, and use of scientific knowledge for individual and collective life. People engaged with science seem most likely to get involved in a scientific enterprise with an uncertain outcome and in which they have much at stake; seem to feel greater spontaneity and freedom to discover, change, believe, and participate in processes of science; seem to experience an increased motivation to take action and creative agency (Chang et al., 2007 ; Fredricks et al., 2004 ; Johnston et al., 2015 ; Wong, 2016 ). Science engagement translates into greater opportunities to experience a more intense relationship with science in everyday life and this is, in turn, results in a deeper participation in which personal and collective agency indicates a greater conviction and deeper understanding of the relevance of science as a process of generation, distribution, and use of scientific knowledge necessary, valuable and useful for everyday life, and in particular, to cope with the challenges of the twenty-first century (DeWitt & Archer, 2017 ; Grabau & Ma, 2017 ; Levinson, 2010 ).

Critical and Emancipatory Approach

Vision-III is also characterized by its rooting in critical theories of education, which emphasize empowerment and the transformation of social power structures. This feature contrasts with Vision-I, in which the conceptual change approaches are predominant and focused on the dynamics of students’ scientific ideas and their approach to formal scientific understandings, and with Vision-II, anchored in the socio-cultural theories of students’ activity (Liu, 2013 ).

In this way, Vision-III could be identified with Hodson’s so-called critical scientific literacy ( 2009 ), where the students’ engagement is geared towards socio-political action to face global concerns and relevant societal problems (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 ). The humanization of science is also reflected in the interest in developing the students’ capacity to think critically about science and deal with scientific experience in a complex society (Ravetz 1997; Norris & Phillips, 2016 ).

The incorporation of a critical position about science in Vision-III goes back to the contributions made by Santos ( 2009 ). Inspired by Paulo Freire’s texts, Santos draws attention to how scientific literacy, in the same way as all types of education, is not neutral and should have a political agenda that includes the social contradiction and conflict present in all societies and displayed in diverse issues such as unequal access to technology, its power of domination, the oppressive context of technological markets, and almost in every single aspect of modern societies in general. Santos takes from Freire the fact that human beings are inserted within contexts of oppression and alienation and that literacy, in addition to teaching reading and writing, should represent a possibility for transforming these conditions of exploitation.

According to Santos, “a radical vision of scientific literacy” should contain “…a political agenda to science education that would include issues such as unequal access to technology around the world, the domination power of technology, and the oppressive context of scientific and modern technological society…” (Santos, 2009 , p. 362). Thus, the development of Vision-III recovers Freirean approaches, and deepens the educational engagement to change oppression and alienation, humanizing school science and transforming the inequitable social reality of the globalized world.

Fundamental to Vision-III, therefore, is the notion of emancipation, understood as “eliminating oppression and creating conditions for effective agency” (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 , p. 71); by becoming emancipated, students can become moral agents, responsible and proactive citizens able to collaborate and communicate in order to participate in public discourses and actions to resolve SSI in a manner that is fair, equitable, and committed to the local and global common good (Lee et al., 2013 ).

Vision-III’s critical and emancipatory character is also present in its active, interdisciplinary teaching strategies, situated in the uncertain and complex contexts of real life, and oriented towards decision-making, ethical reflection, social action, transformation, and empowerment. These strategies, as highlighted by Pedretti and Nazir ( 2011 ), are traditionally outside the repertoires of science teachers aligned with Vision-I.

Vision-I strategies are transmissive, content-centered, and regard values and interests as obstacles to science, relegating and avoiding controversial issues such as risk, uncertainty, ignorance, and resilience, all characteristics of the VUCA world (Ravetz 1997; Bybee, 2016 ; Sjöström & Eilks, 2018 ; Bennett & Lemoine, 2014 ).

Table ​ Table1 1 synthesizes the contrast among Visions-I, -II, and -III of scientific literacy and depicts Vision-III as the fertile space for developing a transformative scientific literacy and for breaking with the reproductive and transmissive character present in the first two visions.

Visions of scientific literacy

Adapted from Liu ( 2013 , p. 29) and Sjöström and Eilks ( 2018 , p. 78)

Table ​ Table1 1 is the result of merging the contributions made by Liu ( 2013 ) and Sjöström and Eilks ( 2018 ) and of problematizing the axis of the relationship between science and society. Each vision proposes particular aims for scientific literacy, and based on them, the ideals and central dimensions for the process of science education are defined. Likewise, each vision assumes a role for the student and gives preference to certain didactic strategies. Thus, for example, as illustrated in Table ​ Table1, 1 , Vision-I is configured around a science thought without society, isolated and focused on the conceptual and epistemological dimensions of scientific enterprise. The theoretical approach of conceptual change is predominant in Vision-I, and therefore, the main content in science school is scientific knowledge as the main product of science, which must be taught mainly through transmissive strategies aimed at information acquisition. Vision-II, on the other hand, as it integrates sociocultural theories, considers science in its relationship with society, but this relation is limited as much as society is only the context in which science happens. Didactic strategies in Vision-II emphasize the discussion and application of science in context, problem solving, and, with this, the pragmatic dimension of science is promoted. It is important to say that in both visions, I and II, the relationship between science and society remains distant. In contrast, Vision-III delves deeper into the ethical, social, and transformative aspect of science, since it is thought of as constituting and being constituted by the society. While in Vision-II society is conceived in a functionalist sense, in Vision-III, it is not yet clear if society is conceptualized in a post-Marxist sense, namely, in conflict and contradiction beyond social class. Rooted in critical theories, Vision-III is driven by the emancipatory ideal and, rather than concentrating on the teaching of scientific knowledge and its application, the formative process encourages critical thinking and socio-scientific reasoning through SSI-type didactic strategies, in which the notion of praxis is key as a measure of the materialization of human agency, and as an action that constructs reality, thereby transforming the world.

From Liu’s ( 2013 ) perspective, these three visions depend on each other and should mutually enhance each other; educational efforts should not focus on just one of them and ignore the other two, as all three form a continuum. Vision-III’s core goal, Liu ( 2013 ) argues, is to promote a more democratic and harmonious society through a stronger engagement between science and society. Likewise, Yore ( 2012 ) maintains that Vision-III has implications for general literacy for citizenship and daily life, since it demands engaging in and with science participation (through confrontation and/or dialogue), without excluding the implications of Vision-I, oriented to the academic preparation to pursue science careers.

One of the main challenges for consolidating Vision-III is to convince responsible politicians, administrators, and teachers that scientific discourse and the learning of science have a functional role in the public debate about issues related with science, technology, society, and environment (Bencze, 2017 ); it is also relevant to show the unavoidable cognitive symbiosis between the fundamental and derived senses of scientific literacy to achieve the society we want, in which science is appreciated as one of the best ways to generate reliable and robust knowledge (Yore, 2012 ).

Despite Vision-III’s conceptual advantages, it does not address the possibility conditions required to materialize a scientific literacy sensitive to the diverse contexts of social and cultural positions from which science students start an educational process and where they live and give sense to science. An indigenous, female, lesbian, Latina student will not have the same opportunities to deploy and realize a science engagement as a male, white, heterosexual, European student. Consequently, it becomes urgent to scrutinize the differential meaning of some conceptual components associated with Vision-III, such as science participation and emancipation and, of course, its pedagogical implications in the roles acquired by teachers and students in a science classroom.

This paper argues that if we want to ensure the continuity of science education and promote its public value, it is not enough to convince society of the functional and critical role of scientific literacy as proposed in Vision-III if this conviction does not go hand in hand with a sound foundation of what scientific literacy means in the plural, diverse, and conflicted contexts in which students live. With students living in unequal conditions of oppression, science education demands a real belief in the relevance of creating new and differentiated scientific literacy opportunities that truly guarantee that science participation and emancipation derived from school science effectively takes place for all students, whose relations with science will be always situated at some point within this diverse and conflicted society.

The present text advocates the theoretical need to critically analyze the notions of “science participation” and “emancipation” contained in Vision-III, making use of tools from the philosophy and sociology of education. These analytical tools allow us to emphasize the conceptual biases and inaccuracies that are present when defining scientific literacy, and that should be addressed in order to configure a set of future educational practices that are more sensitive to the diversity of meanings of scientific literacy, and that consider the structures of oppression that go through all socio-educational processes.

Given that not all students have the same conditions and opportunities for science participation and emancipation, nor do they have all conceptions of scientific literacy or have stopped to think and reflect on this point and its implications in educational practice, the next section argues that having more precise and extended definitions of participation and emancipation in the field of science education could be useful both to broaden our analytical frameworks, which allow us to make visible the different subaltern ways in which members of diverse cultural communities and social groups establish relationships with science, and also to design science teaching and learning experiences that are more plural, inclusive, and sensitive to the different positionalities that science students occupy in the social structure.

Is Scientific Literacy Really Equal for All?

In the previous section, the analysis of Vision-III shows that there has been an important shift from a transmissive vision of scientific literacy to a transformative one, bringing the aims of science education closer to those of citizen education (Bybee, 2016 ; Yore, 2012 ). With this change, notions such as participation, emancipation, and social transformation have been strongly included. Nevertheless, these notions have received a superficial treatment and, consequently, some of their sociological, philosophical, and pedagogical implications have not been correctly addressed. This section argues that Vision-III does not deal with the fact that the experience of science participation, emancipation, and social transformation is lived differently and unequally according to variables like class, ethnicity, and gender. There is no doubt that students have an unequal access to science education based on gender, cultural background, and social identity (Mansour & Wegerif, 2013 ). It also reveals that, depending on how emancipation is understood, there is a risk of reproducing relationships of dependency between the emancipated and the emancipators.

A more critical and deeper approach to Vision-III could be enriched by considering the analytical contributions of theoretical tools derived from sociology and philosophy of education, among them: (1) the intersectional analysis of the notion of science participation, which allows to account for how the structures of inequality and oppression that permeate every educational process also condition and determine the meaning of participation, and (2) the philosophical analysis of the notion of emancipation, which needs to be defined more precisely, since in the light of pedagogical reflection, it appears as a contradictory and complex notion which conditions and determines teacher-student relations.

Science Participation: Brief Analysis from Intersectionality

Intersectionality cannot be understood if we do not first assume the existence of a systematic exclusion and oppression of individuals and groups that has become normal in society, and therefore, an invisible practice (Sánchez & Gil, 2015 ). The homogenization of diversity, on the one hand, and social categorization, on the other, result in social and educational inequalities sustained by arbitrary hierarchies that legitimize the exclusion of some groups and individuals who are simply considered sub-citizens, restricting their access to the same educational, economic, social, political, and cultural opportunities and rights.

In the case of education, exclusion and oppression are historical, ideological, institutional, and embedded in culture in at least the following systems of power (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017 ): (1) Racism: form of oppression associated with colonialism; (2) classism: associated with the capitalist economic model; (3) sexism: rooted in patriarchy.

Collins ( 2015 ) states that intersectionality is “…the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (p. 2). Intersectionality represents a:

…new way of looking at social inequalities and possibilities for social change. Seeing the social problems caused by colonialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism as interconnected provided a new vantage on the possibilities for social change. Many people came to hope for something better, imagining new possibilities for their own lives and those of others… (Collins, 2019 , p. 1).

Harris and Patton ( 2019 ) consider intersectionality as a critical analytic lens to interrogate disparities in structures of inequality. Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) propose intersectionality is “…a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences…” (p. 2) and “…a more sophisticated map of social inequality that goes beyond class-only accounts…” (p. 16). Cho et al. ( 2013 ) complement this definition by asserting that intersectionality is “… an analytic sensibility […] to explore the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power…” (p. 795). According to Maina-Okori et al. ( 2018 ), intersectionality is a framework to deconstruct and disrupt oppression, challenging hegemonic structures such as patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and anthropocentrism that reproduce inequality and contribute to a continued environmental degradation, operating as systems of sociohistorical and economic domination (Esnard & Cobb-Roberts, 2018 ).

In a deeper approach to the complexity of this concept, Collins ( 2015 ) and Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) reflect on how intersectionality has been conceptualized as everything, from a paradigm, concept, framework, heuristic device, and theory; this heterogeneity is seen by Collins ( 2019 ) as both an invitation to examine this concept from many different angles, and as a sign of its dynamism (Collins, 2015 ). Despite this diversity, Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) identify six core ideas that constantly appear and reappear when people use this analytical tool, providing guideposts for intersectional thinking: social inequality, relationality, power relations, social context, complexity, and social justice. According to Collins ( 2019 ), these core constructs (mainly relationality and social justice) uncritically circulate within intersectionality, and therefore, she warns us how these ideas must necessarily be analyzed or critically evaluated in any research that takes intersectionality as an analytical strategy.

Taken as a broad-based knowledge project, Collins ( 2015 ) has analyzed intersectionality from three focal points: (i) as a field of study that refers to the conceptualization of its history, themes, boundaries, debates, and directions; (ii) as an analytical strategy, i.e., as a tool that provides new angles from which to produce knowledge (Cho et al., 2013 ), to study inequalities in social institutions, practices, problems, and other social phenomena, and to solve problems that people face (Collins & Bilge, 2016 ); and (iii) as a critical praxis, examining the ways in which people produce and use it in their daily lives, and for doing social justice projects by different actors. This multidimensionality of intersectionality has also been expressed as a synergy and creative tension between a critical inquiry and a critical practice, mutually informing each other (Collins & Bilge, 2016 ). Similarly to Collins’ efforts, intersectionality has been characterized as a method, as a theoretical framework, and as a form of praxis (Cho et al., 2013 ; Esnard & Cobb-Roberts, 2018 ): (i) as a method, intersectionality offers a systematic way of recognizing structural overlaps in the social interaction and the multiple forms and axes of oppression that could be adopted, adapted, and developed within different disciplines; (ii) as a theoretical framework, this notion is an approach that uses multiple axes to examine the social and permits to engage with a wide range of issues (identities, power, discrimination, activism, among others); and (iii) as a form or praxis, it seeks to formulate the basis of social change, from the point of view of the experiences of injustice that confront marginalized groups (Cho et al., 2013 ; Esnard & Cobb-Roberts, 2018 ).

Intersectionality—a term that emerged from feminism and was coined in 1989 by K. Crenshaw 1 —as Viveros ( 2016 ) points out, avoids the risk of repeating mantras in a depoliticized way, such as the multiculturalist one, so common in education (Collins & Bilge, 2016 ), because it draws attention to the impossibility of separating different forms of oppression. Intersectionality allows to account for power as a multidimensional phenomenon and for the intersected and interwoven perceptions of these power relations in oppression matrices, which are at the same time racial, sexual, or class based.

From the intersectional perspective, it is assumed that more than one category of oppression is involved in all complex political problems and processes. In addition to being intersected, oppressions are also consubstantial and co-extensive, because each one of them leaves its mark on the others and is constructed in a reciprocal manner, and they all are the result of micro- and macro-sociological articulations (Viveros, 2016 ). Thus, for example:

...Sometimes gender creates class, as when gender differences produce social stratifications in the workplace. In others, gender relations are used to reinforce social relations of race, such as when indigenous men are feminized or black men are hypermasculinized... (Viveros, 2016 , p. 8).

According to Santos ( 2009 ), the greatest contribution of scientific literacy in Vision-III would be to prepare citizens for freedom and to build a model of technological development that, instead of sustaining and reproducing oppression, contributes to improving the quality of life of the oppressed people, thus reducing iniquity. Nevertheless, the route delineated by this author concentrates on an image of oppression determined by social class, suppressing the infinite intersections and possible complexities of the structures of injustice and inequality. This deletion also constitutes one of the main criticisms made to Freire’s texts when he speaks of oppression (Walsh, 2019 ).

In the case of Vision-III, Santos ( 2009 ) focuses his criticism only on the capitalist structure that sustains current scientific and technological developments, regardless of the oppression matrixes that result when the axis of social class intersects with cultural (racism) or gender (sexism) oppression axes. It makes invisible the fact that opportunities to participate and engage in and with science and transform society are not the same for everyone beyond the social class.

Intersectionality reveals that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and given oppressions work together in producing injustice (Collins, 2000 ), a couple of categories are crucial within an intersectional perspective: matrix of domination and domains of power. The way intersecting oppressions are organized Collins calls ( 2000 p. 18) “matrix of domination”; the way power works by producing particular patterns of domination Collins names ( 2000 p. 203) “domains of power,” which constitute specific sites where oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation mutually construct one another. Formally, Collins ( 2000 p. 299) defines matrix of domination as:

…the overall organization of hierarchical power relations for any society. Any specific matrix of domination has (1) a particular arrangement of intersecting systems of oppression, e.g., race, social class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, ethnicity and age; and (2) a particular organization of its domains of power, e.g., structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal…

Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) offer a distinction among the four interconnected domains of power: (i) interpersonal, as discriminatory practices of everyday lived experience of people relating to one another; (ii) disciplinary, as people encountering different treatment regarding different institutional norms and codes; (iii) cultural, the set of ideas and ideologies that provide explanations for social inequality; and (iv) structural, how intersecting power relations of class, gender, race, and nation shape the social. Any particular matrix of domination is organized via these four interrelated domains of power, so each matrix of domination is a historically specific organization of power, within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and inhabit; therefore, the domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression and diverse local realities (Collins, 2000 ).

Consequently, all forms of oppression are interconnected, mutually reinforced, and they perpetuate unequal distributions of resources, power, and privilege among social groups. Given that diverse individuals and groups are situated at particular intersections of oppression, they will have different perceptions, experiences, and configurations of social phenomena (Collins, 2015 ), including of course, science.

This occurs with science participation, the most characteristic feature of Vision-III. A more in-depth analysis of this idea from the intersectionality perspective provided by sociology shows the need both to broaden this concept, so that all social groups have a place in it, and to specify it in such a way as to facilitate the design and implementation of concrete scientific literacy actions that truly respond to its programmatic content.

Martínez-Palacios and Nicolas-Bach ( 2016 ) argue that—behind the studies of social participation—although there is a shared interest in claiming equal access of all social groups to the decision-making processes, it is common to wield a false universality of the notion of participation that prevents the effective development of democratic deepening and, in the case of scientific literacy, the achievement of social equity and educational justice.

This false universality ignores the fact that participatory processes also function according to the logic of the fields of power and that participation, under the intersectional point of view, is crossed by different axes of domination (gender, race, social class, age, among others) (Martínez-Palacios & Nicolas-Bach, 2016 ):

...participation does care about gender, but also about race, social class, educational level and age, among other social structures [...]; from which it follows that no definition of participation is culturally neutral and universal; even if we use the same concept we do not employ the same notion... (Martínez-Palacios, 2018 , p. 371)

There is a diversity of meanings of what it is to participate, and these depend, among other elements, on the theoretical positioning in the academic field of the agent who enunciates them, and on his or her social position.

According to Martínez-Palacios ( 2018 ), there is inertia in the classic and critical theories of democracy, which do not include a reflection on oppression and do employ a restrictive notion of participation as synonymous with political participation, so participation is reduced to the act of voting for the election of political leaders. When this universalized and reduced idea of what it is to participate and deliberate is imposed, an act of power and exclusion of those social groups who do not have the capacity to signify occurs.

Thus, for example, we recognize how different global statistics support that girls continue to be underrepresented in STEM subjects, and women continue to be underrepresented in the STEM workforce (Hammond et al., 2020 ); however, these gender gaps, which disproportionally affect the most marginalized girls, have been perpetuated in science education probably because we do not have adequate frames that become visible and that make it possible to imagine, register, and document the different and alternative forms women do in fact have and would have to participate in science, showing their talent and potential. Many female scientists are challenging gender stereotypes in science, resisting sexist practices and discrimination, but their ability to resist and rewrite the popular image of science is often minimized, and when an alternative form of agency is not identified, nor registered or named, simply does not exist, the participation of women is consequently diminished or non-existent in many global reports.

In order to make visible the invisible and informal modes of participation, and thus expand the scope of the concept of participation, Martínez-Palacios ( 2018 ) identifies three images of participation that map its conceptual diversity and reveal its theoretical and practical implications on the educational field. These images are not static and configure a dynamic continuum of mixing and transit among them: (1) a broad conception of participation; (2) a mixed conception; and (3) a restrictive conception of participation (Martínez-Palacios, 2018 ).

In the broad conception of participation, any transformative act is identified as a participatory act, and this includes those that traditionally have had a residual treatment: “…every social act that is projected to build society is participation…” (Martínez-Palacios, 2018 , p. 382). The mixed conception of participation assumes that the hegemonic definition of this concept is socially constructed and organizes and divides participation between that which is visible, routine, technified, public, and that which is invisible. The mixed conception recognizes these two forms of participation but gives greater importance to the former.

Martínez-Palacios ( 2018 ) recovers the classification of Cunill ( 1991 ), who distinguishes among (a) citizen participation (experiences of intervention by individuals in public activities to assert their social interests); (b) political participation (intervention in the structures available to political systems); (c) social participation (which arises from the grouping of individuals in society to defend their interests); and (d) community participation (oriented towards sustaining the community). In this categorization, a distinction is made between the participation to which everybody should aspire, which is considered formal, visible, and with a universal vocation (political and citizen), and informal and invisible participation (community and social), which paradoxically supports the former, but frequently occupies a residual and unrecognized place despite being essential to social life, since it is through it—as Martínez-Palacios ( 2018 ) points out—that oppressed groups have been able to learn and demonstrate skills to improve the life conditions of the family, the neighborhood, the town, or the community.

The restrictive conception of participation draws a clear frontier between what is and what is not participation and becomes it a synonym of political participation, excluding and underestimating any intervention or informal activity linked or destined to the care of the community. This conception condenses “…the illusion of the existence of a culturally neutral and universal participation whose technical aspects are underlined, detached from an interpretation or theory about power…”. (Martínez-Palacios, 2018 , p. 381).

What does it mean to participate in science within Vision-III? No definition of scientific literacy makes a deep reflection about this conceptual component. By not including a qualification of how science participation is understood within Vision-III, and by not adjectivizing it, it is highly likely that the only concept being considered as participation is the too narrow notion that Martínez-Palacios ( 2018 ) characterizes as a supposedly universal notion of participation, “…often used as a synonym for political participation, which would make invisible other forms of participation linked to community or social solidarity, traditionally carried out by women…” (p. 371).

In contrast with the higher education field, where intersectionality has made an increasing contribution (Esnard & Cobb-Roberts, 2018 ; Harris & Patton, 2019 ; Nichols and Stahl, 2019 ; Haynes et al., 2020 ), in the science education field, intersectionality has just been examined, among others, in its relationship with political science faculties (Cabrera, 2014 ), medical education (Muntinga et al., 2016 ), mathematical education (Bullock, 2018 ), geoscience education research (Matheis et al. 2019 ; Núñez et al., 2020 ), science identity (Avraamidou, 2020 ; Castro & Collins, 2021 ), and in environmental and sustainability education (Maina-Okori et al., 2018 ). According to Metcalf et al. ( 2018 , p. 583) “…one reason, apart from the lack of awareness, researchers have not yet adopted intersectionality frameworks for studying STEM participation is that it poses methodological challenges…”.

In geosciences education research, perhaps the field with a relevant progress in intersectionality and science education, Matheis et al. ( 2019 ) examined the literature 2008–2018 around intersectionality and inclusivity, with particular interest in the underrepresentation of white women and people of color of all genders in the geosciences. They identified three primary themes that can be synthetized as (a) increased challenges to science as neutral, (b) continued assumptions of meritocracy in higher education, and (c) assimilation as representation. This last theme is relevant for understanding science participation as part of the central argument of this paper, because Matheis et al. ( 2019 ) observed that there have been many efforts to increase the representation of women and minoritized racial and ethnic groups in the geosciences, but these efforts attempt to change individuals in order to assimilate them to the school norms; that is to say, these studies have been focused on developing individual skills and capacities to increase success within existing structures, without changing the norms and expectations of the science culture, and without challenging the common culture that structures science itself in educational institutions.

In a similar line of thought, Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) discussed how intersectionality as an analytical framework shed light on the underrepresentation within STEM fields of girls/women and African Americans/Latinos. In their analysis, they propose that intersectionality would increase attention not only on structural barriers to science that these groups face, but also on how the same barriers are experienced differently; intersectional analysis would change the understanding or the underrepresentation in science fields, suggesting that it is more the organization of formal science education itself and its different domains of power (cultural, interpersonal, structural, and disciplinary), and not individual attributes (i.e., cultural capital) that predispose individuals from these groups to higher science achievement.

Other contributions on the issue of the underrepresentation of certain groups in science fields are Sparks ( 2017 ), Ireland et al. ( 2018 ), Metcalf et al. ( 2018 ), and Núñez et al. ( 2020 ) who have noticed how social factors, like gender, race, and ethnicity, have been heavily studied, but largely in isolation from one another, while others, like sexuality and disability, have remained mostly absent from the research, policy, and practice. To broaden science participation, they examine the underrepresentation in STEM fields of historically marginalized groups, such as women of color, and apply the intersectionality lens to issue recommendations and expand equity in scientific fields as geosciences. These studies show an increasing need to take advantage of intersectionality as a framework to register not only the barriers that hinder science participation of disadvantaged groups, but also the diverse forms to participate in science that could change the popular images of science and the traditional notion of science participation that could be present in Vision-III of scientific literacy.

Introducing an intersectional perspective to Vision-III allows us to identify new ways of exploring, understanding, and facing the problems of science education and also allows us to make visible the fact that certain activities associated with science and are actually carried out by historically excluded groups, are usually invisible or qualified as non-participation in science, and this is sociologically significant because a different form of participation is not the same as disaffection with science or as a lesser engagement. Intersectionality problematizes, on the one hand, the importance of reviewing what is being registered as an authentic science participation, and that could be omitting and excluding the different subaltern forms of participation that different cultural communities could develop, or, in fact, are already developing in science education. Introducing the intersectional perspective also allows us to create and propose strategies to reduce exclusion in science education, and transform current literacy practices towards more just and accessible to all, with which, depending on the interests and the rational of each culture, it would be possible to take advantage of the virtues of science as a social practice of common benefit for a diverse society in which many injustices overlap.

Additionally, in multicultural contexts where science is not a hegemonic activity, I consider that introducing the intersectional perspective into the conceptual analysis of scientific literacy allows us to argue that participation in science should not be discussed under the binomial of participate or not-participate; instead, it is necessary to have a broad concept of participation that, taking into consideration the concrete analysis of social structures and historical and cultural dynamics of different groups, could include the multiple ways in which different social and cultural communities, especially those structurally excluded from science, could participate in science, improving their personal and collective lives, even when these forms of participation do not correspond to the hegemonic ones (civic and political participation). To begin naming and recognizing this diversity in which participation in science is expressed would facilitate the possibility of creating a new narrative for science education, and would foster the design of innovative and more flexible educational environments and science school experiences that also are more sensitive to social and cultural diversities and more inclusive and motivating, so that the populations of students whose lives are spent in environments much more distant from those sets of social codes and norms in which many of the scientific practices take place could become more involved and engaged in science.

Intersectionality, in the same way as critical education and particularly Vision-III revisited here, considers social justice as central to its mission; however, as Collins ( 2019 , p. 2) points out, it has not yet realized its potential as a critical social theory, nor has it adequately democratized its own processes for producing knowledge. Using it as an analytic tool might provide science education research with “…a more expansive lens for addressing the complexities of educational equity…” (Collins & Bilge, 2016 , p. 188). Its core ideas, such as power and its domains, enable this analytical tool with a huge potential to refocus attention within Vision-III, on the structural organization of science schooling, showing how intersecting power relations, in a contextualized and historicized way, shape “…identities, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural representations and ideologies…” (Collins & Bilge, 2016 , p. 202).

In sum, the analytical tasks that intersectionality enable and strengthen for science literacy research are (Dill and Zambrana 2009, cited on Núñez, 2014 ) (a) to situate as a starting point for educational research the lived experiences of marginalized groups and the often masked pedagogical biases; (b) to explore the social and cultural complexities of individual and collective identities, recognizing those groups that are often ignored and essentialized; (c) to unveil the ways in which domains of power interconnect with each other, organize, and structure inequality and oppression in science education fields; and (c) to promote social and educational justice by linking critical inquiry and practice towards the eradication of oppressions and the advancement of a transformative agenda for the change of social and educational institutions.

Emancipation: a Philosophical and Pedagogical Analysis

Emancipation is one of the other key components of the transformative vision of scientific literacy, and to avoid conceptual ambiguities and mainly to be able to design successful pedagogical actions, it is also necessary to add some conceptual accuracy for a better understanding of the multiple senses of this term.

The idea of emancipation is nodal in educational theories and practices, even more so in those which considered themselves critical pedagogies (Biesta, 2010 , 2017 ). Emancipation is an ideal historically pursued, which has been transformed over time, to constitute the utopia of transformative education in our days (Romo, 2016 ).

In emancipation, educators elevate the desire for students to become independent and autonomous, to be able to think for themselves, to make their own judgments and conclusions; this notion embodies the possibilities of changing the oppressive structures in which students are inserted (Biesta, 2010 ).

Biesta ( 2010 , 2017 ) reviews the historical changes to this notion and finds that emancipation literally means to give away ownership ( ex : away; mancipum : ownership). In Roman law, it referred to the freeing of a son or wife from the legal authority of the father— pater familias (Gross, 2010 )—an imprint that marks its bond with education, in the sense that emancipation defines the moment when a child (dependent) becomes an adult (independent). In more general terms, it refers to the freeing of someone from the authority or control of another, which implies that the object of emancipation (person to be emancipated) is released and becomes independent as a result of the act of emancipation (Biesta, 2010 ).

According to the Real Academia Española (Romo, 2016 ), emancipation is freeing from any kind of subordination or dependence. From being used in relation to religion (seventeenth century), emancipation shifted its focus to slaves (eighteenth century), and to women and workers (nineteenth century). During the enlightenment, in the eighteenth century and as a key concept present in Kant’s texts, emancipation became linked to the idea of man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage, that is, from his immaturity or “…inability to make use of his understanding without the direction of another…” (Biesta, 2010 , p. 42). Becoming enlightened implied becoming independent or autonomous, and for Kant, this autonomy was the ultimate goal for a human being, that is, the use of one’s reason, a capacity that could only be possible through education. Following Biesta ( 2010 ), Kant differentiated between immaturity and maturity and this distinction maps onto the difference between childhood and adulthood; only through education can one move from one to the other.

After World War II, it was assumed that there would be no individual emancipation without a broader transformation of society, and this was central to the historical evolution of critical traditions of education during the 1960s (Gross, 2010 ). By occupying a key position as a hinge between old and new generations, education became strategic to critical theories, interested in analyzing the structures and practices of oppression, to argue that emancipation would only take place by unveiling (or demystifying) the power relations in which individuals are embedded (Biesta, 2010 ).

Biesta ( 2010 , 2017 ) strongly criticizes the traditional notion of emancipation which, contradicting its origin, ends up reproducing the power and hierarchical relations between the agents who participate in a pedagogical relationship; instead, Biesta takes up and reconstructs contributions such as those of Rancière ( 2003 , 2009 ) to delineate a different and alternative approach to emancipation.

According to Biesta ( 2010 , 2017 ), there is an argumentative strand within the critical tradition in which it is argued that emancipation can only be brought about “from the outside,” that is, from a position uncontaminated by the workings of power; from this point of view, emancipation functions as a process of demystification and liberation from dogmatism. This line of thought goes back to Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness, in which to free ourselves from the oppressive functioning of power we need to expose our consciousness to how power operates, but in addition, we need someone else, whose consciousness is not subjected to the workings of power, to provide us with an explanation of our objective condition. That is, the truth of our objective condition can only be generated by someone who is “outside” the influence of ideology (and, of course, this “someone” could be science itself). Following Biesta ( 2010 ), the task of critical educators is to make visible what is hidden to those who are the object of their emancipatory efforts; in the same way, the task of critical social science is to make visible what is hidden from the everyday view.

Following this logic, Biesta ( 2010 ) highlights some philosophical features of emancipation that condition it and determine it to a certain pedagogical logic: (1) that emancipation requires an intervention from the outside by someone not subjected to the power to be defeated; (2) that emancipation is based on an inequality and asymmetry present between emancipator and emancipated; (3) that equality is the—future and expected—result of emancipation, but not its starting point.

Biesta ( 2010 ) systematizes the contradictions of this emancipatory logic: (1) although emancipation is oriented towards equality, independence, and freedom, it instills a dependence on the emancipatory act; without intervention, there is no emancipation, and whoever is emancipated depends on the intervention of the emancipator, who possesses knowledge inaccessible to the former; (2) emancipation is based on a fundamental inequality between the emancipator and the emancipated; the former occupies a superior position, since he is the one who knows best and who can best perform the act of demystification required to reveal the functioning of power; (3) emancipation is based on the distrust and suspicion of the emancipator about the limitations of his own experiences, and this makes it necessary for an emancipator to tell the emancipated the truth about what he is really experiencing, about his situation and his real problems.

As an alternative to resolve these tensions, Biesta ( 2010 ) reminds us that the relationship of dependence that is established with this idea of emancipation, and that is constitutive of Western philosophy and social theory, has been questioned by Rancière ( 2003 , 2009 ), who shows that thinking of the emancipatory process in this way involves a logic of dependence in which he who is emancipated remains dependent on the truth or knowledge about their conditions of oppression that will be revealed by the emancipator.

For Rancière, emancipation is escaping from a minority. With this alternative definition, he places, on the one hand, the act of emancipation in the emancipated because “…nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts…” (Biesta, 2010 , p. 46), and, on the other hand, he links this act to a process of subjectification, which causes a rupture with the established order. The emergence of a subjectivity through education produces a declassification or desidentification, to the extent that the emerging (emancipated) subject is declassified with respect to the social order through the exercise of his or her rational capacity (Madrid 2012). Likewise, Rancière assumes that equality is not a goal to be reached with emancipation, but that emancipation acts on the basis of presupposing equality (of intelligence of all human beings), in order to maximize it: “…central to emancipation, therefore, is the awareness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself…” (Biesta, 2010 , p. 55). His proposal of the “ignorant schoolmaster” constitutes this instance of emancipation (Madrid 2012).

Besides the analysis made by Biesta ( 2010 ) about Rancière's work, we could add the comparative studies between Freire and Rancière (Biesta, 2017 ; Galloway, 2012 ) which emphasize the importance of having to always specify how emancipation is conceived when talking about it in education. Freire and Rancière coincide in criticizing the modern logic of emancipation, but it should be noted that they came to similar assumptions through different paths, and with different results. Galloway and Biesta show that, depending on how oppression and emancipation are understood, these logics will have different pedagogical implications on the character of the relationship that will be established between teachers and students, and on the teachers’ role in the emancipatory process.

Such implications are not explicit in the definition of scientific literacy proposed in Vision-III, since there is not a precise description of the kind of emancipation that is necessary to transform society based on students’ science participation.

Santos ( 2009 ) emphasizes that scientific literacy should include discussions about the conditions of oppression present in the society where science is developed, since that is the context where its humanistic character lies. Adopting the Freirean formula of reading the world and sharing it with others in order to build and rebuild it, Santos proposes that scientific literacy should consist of identifying the socially relevant issues to be discussed; discussing them through dialogue, highlighting the contradictions that science has in society, and debating the actions required for its transformation, committing students to these socio-political actions—that is, to a political agenda. This logic, in which the student realizes “the objective facts” such as, for example, that few enjoy the benefits of technologies, while two-thirds of the world’s population cannot access them, or do not even have the most basic conditions for a dignified life (Santos, 2009 ), seems to carry with it a limited emancipatory logic based on the dependence of superior knowledge possessed by the emancipator, silencing the cultural difference in which science takes place. If this idea of emancipation stays at the basis of Vision-III, it would be more difficult to achieve the transformative aims that scientific literacy sets out to attain.

It is mostly in multicultural contexts that an expanded concept of emancipation is of particular relevance for science teaching, because it has played a prominent role in the colonial process (Burke & Wallace, 2020 ); it is common in these contexts for science to present itself as the only legitimate and emancipatory knowledge, competing and erasing the various alternative forms of knowledge that have been generated outside the European scientific matrix (Zidny et al., 2020 ) and excluding cultural diversity in the science classroom. Approaching science as a liberating and emancipating force that frees humans from local beliefs, myths, and ideologies in contexts where different forms of knowledge coexist (personal, popular, indigenous, traditional, rural, and mainstream academic knowledge) carries the risk of reinforcing a scientism and a neocolonialism that are commonly expressed as the educational effort of displacement, eradication, or substitution of alternative forms of knowledge for scientific knowledge, regardless of the potential value that these alternative forms of knowledge might have in the VUCA world to cope with the environmental, social, and economic challenges that we currently face.

In order to achieve a transformative education that facilitates a sustainable future and more just, equitable, and plural societies, I sustain that it is necessary to design scientific literacy experiences that allow students to understand, value, and relate to the world differently in their everyday lives, not only through canonic scientific ideas, but (a) fostering the dialogical and respectful exchange of diverse perspectives on the social and natural world; (b) taking advantage of the best of the different alternative forms of knowledge; and (c) cultivating their engagement, both with science and with their communities and cultures of origin. As students are educated for emancipation, as Feyerabend said, “… they will become scientists without having been taken in by the ideology of science, they will be scientists because they have made a free choice…” (Feyerabend, 1975 : 310). In this sense, scientific literacy for emancipation implies learning not only to read and write scientific texts, but also the appropriation of the scientific language to express their own intentions and to become authors and agents that define their own place in the social and natural world; that means, scientific literacy is then a social practice and a tool for the self-construction of one’s voice and place in the world (Hernández, 2019 ).

Conclusions

In the aftermath of the pandemic, there has been a consensus among different countries that scientific literacy is vital and strategic to meet the global challenges ahead. It is widely accepted that scientific knowledge and scientific thinking are essential to participate in democracy and, in general, to make decisions about global risks. However, the engagement of children and young people with science subjects in school is continuously declining around the world. Research suggests that cultural diversity issues lie behind this permanent crisis in scientific literacy (Mansour & Wegerif, 2013 ), not only diversity in gender, social class, and ethnicity, but also the diversity of ways in which new generations establish relations with scientific knowledge, and that go beyond opting to study a scientific career.

The diversity of individual and collective ways of living and relating to science means that the meaning of becoming literate in science has been moving from a transmissive and propaedeutic vision to a transformative vision engaged with socioscientific activism (Bencze, 2017 ). However, the transformative vision continues to have some difficulties in the way we conceive of it and concretize it into effective educational practice, if we do not consider, from an interdisciplinary point of view, the diversity of meanings that its conceptual components could have, not only according to the contexts and communities in which we live, but also according to the social roles that we choose or are assigned by others (Mansour & Wegerif, 2013 ).

Different policy documents from OECD and UNESCO have been stressing the need to prepare students for the VUCA world (Hadar et al., 2020 ), in which existing institutions and social structures appear to be insufficient to overcome the new situations. The VUCA world demands a science education that is more socially committed to the transformation of social oppression and a science education that broadens the agency capacity of individuals and communities to take advantage of science in the generation of adaptative, resilient, and sustainable responses to unpredictable changes of today. The preparation of autonomous and emancipated individuals committed to participating in science must translate into more opportunities to respond to the VUCA world, as it requires more flexibility, resilience, and sustainability in decision-making and more creative actions that take advantage of multiple ways in which the best of science and cultures could be used to achieve a positive and necessary social change for a society in crisis.

The conceptual analysis presented in this paper intends to show the need to continue rethinking and reconceptualizing scientific literacy in such a way that makes it possible to recover its most fundamental sense but also including its derived sense in an interdisciplinary manner more compatible with the diversity of conflicted, cultural, and social experiences in which students and teachers are inserted and which, from the beginning, make more or less incompatible their lives with the processes of science teaching and learning.

Given that not all the actors who define what scientific literacy is share the same senses, values, and aims of what is socially desirable, the concept of scientific literacy remains multivocal and its understanding and evaluation requires a more precise identification about the axiological, sociological, ethical–political, and pedagogical commitments that are behind each conception proposed for this term, insofar as these conceptions express “…programs of action…” (Norris et al., 2014 , p. 1319).

Science participation and emancipation are not homogeneous, and students are not an undifferentiated mass of people that exists beyond social divisions of race, gender, age, among others; unmasking positions and power is relevant to broadening the scope and understanding of the components of Vision-III of scientific literacy.

Throughout this text, there has been an argument for the need to recover the fundamental sense of scientific literacy, on the one hand, and on the other, for the need to deepen and strengthen its derived sense, introducing in it an intersectional and emancipatory perspective that by definition is anti-scientificist, antiracist, and anti-neocolonialist. When certain facts of educational reality do not fit into the current conceptual frameworks, it is necessary to rethink these frameworks and propose the incorporation of new ones. Adding extended concepts of participation and emancipation would contribute to make visible and make it possible to recognize the diversity of actors, of emerging practices and activities committed to science, whose agency is not only challenging the hegemonic image and the dominant system of science, but also is rewriting the whole of actions that actually function as producers of innovative and unique solutions to social problems, based on science and at the same time on different forms of knowledge, which together configure new plural and dialogic scientific practices, refreshing science education as a motor for social and community transformations, mainly in structurally vulnerable and unseen contexts, that frequently are excluded from the more traditional views of scientific literacy.

Science is more than the declarative knowledge it generates, and the fundamental sense of literacy reminds us the essential role, now diluted, of scientific texts, and it also allows us to acknowledge the social and epistemic functions of reading and writing science as social, interactive, iterative, regulated, and negotiated practices in which substantive scientific knowledge is constructed. Reading and writing in the scientific disciplines implies teaching and learning strategies for understanding, interpreting, reinterpreting, analyzing, criticizing (Norris & Phillips, 2003 ; Norris et al., 2014 ), and, of course, elaborating scientific texts, and this is what their fundamental sense points out.

Likewise, in its derived sense, scientific literacy is a potential tool for social transformation, and it certainly requires the participation of all citizens and their emancipation. But not of a limited participation narrowly conceived as a synonym of formal, political, and citizen participation, but of a more inclusive participation that makes visible the invisible and informal contributions of diverse social groups that have been historically vulnerable and usually excluded from science and technology. Similarly, to be transformative, scientific literacy requires a commitment to an alternative notion of emancipation that avoids generating dependencies that assign, in a contradictory way, roles of superiority to science teachers and to science itself that are mostly frequent in multicultural contexts.

This research was supported by UNAM-DGAPA-PAPIIT IG400920.

Data Availability

Code availability, declarations.

The author declares no competing interests.

While it is assumed in academia that the term “intersectionality” was coined and introduced by Crenshaw in 1989 to demonstrate how US social structures frame identities as isolated and mutually exclusive, resulting in the erasure of black women who hold multiple minoritized identities (Harris and Patton, 2019 ), Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) have specified that the origins of intersectionality date back much further, in the 1960–1970 social movements of women of racially minoritized groups.

Recalling this genealogy makes it easier to understand the link that intersectionality has with the development of a radical and transformative social and educational agenda, because it reveals that at the center of intersectionality, and beyond the intellectual interests, lies the praxis and the theme of social justice (Collins and Bilge, 2016 ). In this sense, Tefera et al. ( 2018 ) and Rice et al. ( 2019 ) warn us how intersectionality could be narrowly focused on issues of identity, forgetting that it is mainly a framework to examine and question the power and oppression, and that the intersectional analysis must be committed to social justice: “…intersectionality is not just a set of ideas. Instead, because they inform social action, intersectionality’s ideas have consequences in the social world….” (Collins, 2019 , p. 2).

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Scientific Literacy and Critical Thinking Skills: Nurturing a Better Future

Scientific literacy and critical thinking are essential components of a well-rounded education, preparing students to better understand the world we live in and make informed decisions. As science and technology continue to advance and impact various aspects of our lives, it is increasingly important for individuals to develop the ability to think critically about scientific information, fostering a deeper understanding of the implications and consequences of such advancements. By fostering scientific literacy, students become equipped with the knowledge and skills to actively engage with science-related issues in a responsible and informed manner.

The development of critical thinking skills is crucial not only within the realm of science, but across all disciplines and aspects of life. These skills enable individuals to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information—essential attributes for navigating the modern world. As science communication and dissemination become more widespread, having the ability to critically assess validity, objectivity, and authority is paramount to being a responsible and engaged citizen.

Focusing on scientific literacy and critical thinking in education prepares students for a world where science and technology play a pivotal role across numerous fields. By cultivating these capacities, students will be better prepared to face complex issues and tasks, contribute positively to society, and pave the way for continued advancements and innovations.

Key Concepts and Principles

Science education foundations.

Scientific literacy and critical thinking are essential components of a well-rounded science education. These foundational skills equip students with the ability to understand key concepts, develop scientific reasoning, and utilize scientific knowledge for personal and social purposes as defined in Science for All Americans .

A strong science education involves:

• Acquiring scientific knowledge and understanding the core concepts of various disciplines
• Developing the ability to analyze and evaluate scientific claims and arguments
• Enhancing writing and communication skills to effectively convey scientific ideas

By focusing on these elements, educators empower students to think and function as responsible citizens in an increasingly science-driven world.

Metacognition and Reflection

Metacognition, or the process of thinking about one’s own thinking, plays a crucial role in fostering critical thinking skills in science education. Cambridge highlights key steps in the critical thinking process, which include:

• Identifying a problem and asking questions about that problem
• Selecting information to respond to the problem and evaluating it
• Drawing conclusions from the evidence

By incorporating metacognitive strategies and promoting reflection throughout the learning process, educators enable students to actively engage with scientific concepts, building a deeper understanding and fostering critical thinking abilities.

In summary, a well-rounded science education places emphasis on the development of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills, based on a strong foundation in core concepts and knowledge. Incorporating metacognitive strategies and promoting reflection throughout the learning process further enhances these skills, equipping students for success in their future scientific endeavors. Remember to maintain a confident, knowledgeable, neutral, and clear tone of voice when discussing these topics.

Curriculum and Pedagogy

Teaching and learning approaches.

Teaching and learning approaches play a crucial role in promoting scientific literacy and critical thinking skills among students. One effective strategy for encouraging these skills is to create a thinking-based classroom, where the learning environment is shaped to support thinking and create opportunities for students to engage in scientific concepts 1 .

Educators can achieve this by incorporating a variety of pedagogical techniques, such as:

• Scaffolded instruction : Gradually develop students’ understanding by modeling, guided instruction, and eventually allowing students to take ownership of their learning.
• Inquiry-based learning : Encourage exploration and questions to build understanding of scientific concepts.
• Collaborative learning : Use group projects and discussions to inspire debate and foster interaction among students, allowing them to learn from one another’s perspectives.

Incorporating Argumentation and Experimentation

Argumentation and experimentation are key components of scientific inquiry that contribute to students’ scientific literacy and critical thinking skills:

• Argumentation : Incorporating argumentation in the curriculum helps students learn how to construct, evaluate, and refine scientific claims based on evidence 2 . This can be done through structured debates, teaching students to craft written scientific arguments, and evaluating peer arguments in a constructive manner.
• Experimentation : Encouraging students to engage in hands-on experimentation allows them to explore scientific concepts more deeply while fostering their critical thinking skills 3 . Providing opportunities for experimentation can include designing experiments, carrying them out, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions.

By incorporating these teaching and learning approaches, as well as focusing on argumentation and experimentation, educators can effectively promote scientific literacy and critical thinking skills in their curriculum and pedagogy.

Assessing Scientific Literacy and Critical Thinking Skills

Test instruments and procedures.

There are various test instruments designed to assess students’ scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. One such instrument is the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS) , which focuses on measuring skills related to essential aspects of scientific literacy, such as:

• Recognizing and analyzing the use of methods of inquiry that lead to scientific knowledge
• Organizing, analyzing, and interpreting quantitative data and scientific information

The TOSLS is a multiple-choice test that allows educators to evaluate students’ understanding of scientific reasoning and their ability to apply scientific concepts in real-life situations.

Apart from standardized tests, it is crucial to incorporate critical thinking into everyday learning activities. Educators may use various methods, such as discussing complex scientific problems within the context of current events and engaging students in collaborative problem-solving tasks.

International Comparisons

When evaluating scientific literacy and critical thinking skills, it is helpful to put the findings into a broader context by comparing them with international standards and benchmarks. One significant international study is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) , which measures the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science every three years. PISA assesses students based on their abilities to use their scientific knowledge for:

• Identifying scientific issues
• Explaining phenomena scientifically
• Evaluating and designing scientific enquires

By evaluating and comparing students’ performance across different countries, PISA contributes to a deeper understanding of different strategies and curricula used to foster scientific literacy and critical thinking skills in different educational contexts.

In conclusion, the assessment of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills is critical for evaluating the quality of science education. By using well-validated test instruments and comparing students’ performance internationally, educators can better understand the effectiveness of different teaching strategies and work to improve science literacy and critical thinking skills for all students.

Factors Influencing Performance and Motivation

Role of gender in physics education.

Research indicates that gender plays a significant role in students’ performance and motivation in physics education. Male and female students exhibit different levels of interest and confidence in the subject, which impact their academic achievements. A correlational study found a positive relationship between critical thinking skills and scientific literacy in both genders but did not identify any significant correlation between gender and these skills.

It is essential to recognize and address these gender differences when designing curriculum and learning environments to encourage equal participation and confidence in physics education for all students.

Decision Making and Problem-Solving

Developing strong decision-making and problem-solving skills are crucial components of scientific literacy. These skills enable students to apply scientific concepts and principles in real-world situations while reinforcing a more humanistic culture based on rational thinking, as highlighted in this article .

• Motivation : A student’s motivation to learn and engage in scientific activities plays a vital role in the development of their decision-making and problem-solving skills. High motivation levels promote curiosity, actively seeking knowledge, and persistence in solving complex problems.
• Correlation analysis : Studies have shown a positive relationship between scientific literacy, critical thinking, and the ability to use scientific knowledge for personal and social purposes. This correlation underlines the importance of fostering these skills in the education system.

When incorporating decision-making and problem-solving skills into science education, focus should be placed on engaging students in critical thinking exercises and creating a conducive learning environment that encourages curiosity, exploration, and collaboration.

Scientific Literacy in Everyday Life

Interpreting news reports.

Scientific literacy plays a crucial role in interpreting news reports. A confident, knowledgeable, and neutral understanding of scientific principles and facts allows individuals to critically evaluate the claims made in news articles or television segments, and determine the validity of the information presented.

For example, when encountering a news report about a new health study, it is essential to consider sample size, research methodology, and potential conflicts of interest among the researchers. A clear understanding of these factors can help prevent the spread of misinformation and promote informed decision-making.

Moreover, separating scientific facts from theories enables individuals to better grasp the certainty and uncertainty surrounding the news report. This distinction is crucial for discerning the current state of scientific knowledge and identifying areas where more research is needed.

Understanding and Evaluating Scientific Facts

Maintaining a neutral and clear perspective on science allows individuals to effectively understand and evaluate scientific facts. This involves understanding the difference between facts , which are verifiable pieces of information, and theories , which are well-substantiated explanations for observable phenomena.

For instance, the recognition that the Earth revolves around the Sun is a fact, while the theory of evolution provides a comprehensive explanation of the origin and development of species. Developing the ability to analyze and contextualize scientific information is crucial for forming well-grounded opinions and engaging in informed discussions.

Moreover, the promotion of scientific literacy allows for the appreciation of the interrelatedness of scientific disciplines. This comprehensive understanding can enhance the assessment of scientific facts and their implications in various aspects of daily life, such as making informed choices about healthcare, technology, and environmental issues. Keeping these considerations in mind, fostering scientific literacy and critical thinking skills are essential for responsible citizenship and decision-making in the modern world.

Future Research Agenda

Developing scientific literacy and critical thinking skills is crucial in today’s world, both for individual success and society as a whole. Consequently, a future research agenda exploring these areas is essential, particularly in relation to high school students as they prepare to become responsible citizens.

One of the key issues to address within this agenda is the relationship between science knowledge and attitudes toward science. This includes assessing whether a significant correlation exists between improved scientific understanding and more positive attitudes towards the scientific method and scientific discovery. Gaining insights into this aspect will help guide the development of educational resources and methodologies to foster a more science-minded society.

Another area of interest is the utility of scientific literacy in various career and life contexts. This would involve studying how scientific literacy can be applied to non-science fields, and how it influences individuals’ decision-making processes and problem-solving abilities.

Moreover, research should explore the relationship between science literacy and other literacy skills , such as mathematics, reading comprehension, and writing. This may help educators develop interdisciplinary curricula that promote the growth of critical thinking abilities and scientific understanding simultaneously.

Furthermore, emphasizing the role of scientific literacy for citizens as decision-makers is crucial. It is important to examine how improved scientific literacy influences students’ capacities to evaluate information, engage in public discourse, and make informed choices on matters that involve scientific data or principles.

Lastly, it might be beneficial to investigate the impact of innovative teaching methods, such as transformative science education and futures thinking, on developing students’ scientific literacy and critical thinking abilities. By shedding light on possible approaches that foster these essential skills, researchers can contribute to the continuous evolution of science education.

In summary, focusing on these key threads in a future research agenda will be invaluable in promoting a deeper understanding of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. By doing so, we can work towards equipping high school students with the tools required to navigate an increasingly complex and science-driven world.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of having scientific literacy and critical thinking skills.

Scientific literacy and critical thinking skills are essential for individuals to understand the world around them and make informed decisions. These skills enable people to differentiate science from pseudoscience and evaluate the credibility of information. Moreover, scientifically literate citizens are better equipped to participate in important societal discussions and contribute to policy-making processes.

How can educators effectively teach scientific literacy and critical thinking skills?

Educators can teach these skills by designing activities that promote critical thinking and scientific inquiry. For example, teachers can create learning experiences where students identify problems and ask questions about them, select relevant information, and draw conclusions based on evidence. Furthermore, incorporating case studies, group discussions, and scientific experiments into the curriculum can help students develop these skills.

What role does digital literacy play in promoting scientific literacy and critical thinking?

Digital literacy is an essential component in fostering scientific literacy and critical thinking. In today’s technology-driven world, individuals must be capable of navigating and evaluating online resources to access accurate information. Digital literacy skills, such as determining the credibility of websites and online articles, can help learners critically assess scientific information, weighing the evidence to form well-founded opinions.

How do life and career skills relate to scientific literacy and critical thinking?

Life and career skills, such as communication, problem solving, and adaptability, are intertwined with scientific literacy and critical thinking. These abilities are crucial in equipping individuals to face real-world challenges and make informed decisions in various fields, from science and technology to business and government. An understanding of scientific principles and the ability to think critically foster the development of crucial life and career skills that are increasingly sought-after in today’s world.

What’s the connection between problem-solving skills and scientific literacy?

Problem-solving skills are closely related to scientific literacy, as they empower individuals to analyze situations, identify problems, and devise appropriate solutions. Scientific literacy involves understanding scientific ways of knowing and thinking critically about the natural world. In essence, acquiring scientific literacy enables individuals to apply the principles and methods of science to problem-solving situations in various aspects of life.

How can reflective practice enhance critical thinking in science?

Reflective practice is a valuable tool in enhancing critical thinking skills in science. It involves examining one’s thoughts, actions, and experiences to learn and improve. By engaging in reflective practice, learners can identify personal biases, recognize gaps in their understanding, and determine ways to improve their scientific knowledge and thinking abilities. This process, in turn, promotes critical thinking and a deeper understanding of scientific concepts.

• Eight Instructional Strategies for Promoting Critical Thinking ↩
• Fostering Scientific Literacy and Critical Thinking in Elementary Science Education ↩
• The Biochemical Literacy Framework: Inviting pedagogical innovation in bioscience education ↩

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An empirical analysis of the relationship between nature of science and critical thinking through science definitions and thinking skills

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• Published: 08 December 2022
• Volume 2 , article number  270 , ( 2022 )

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• María Antonia Manassero-Mas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7804-7779 1 &
• Ángel Vázquez-Alonso   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5830-7062 2  

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Critical thinking (CRT) skills transversally pervade education and nature of science (NOS) knowledge is a key component of science literacy. Some science education researchers advocate that CRT skills and NOS knowledge have a mutual impact and relationship. However, few research studies have undertaken the empirical confirmation of this relationship and most fail to match the two terms of the relationship adequately. This paper aims to test the relationship by applying correlation, regression and ANOVA procedures to the students’ answers to two tests that measure thinking skills and science definitions. The results partly confirm the hypothesised relationship, which displays some complex features: on the one hand, the relationship is positive and significant for the NOS variables that express adequate ideas about science. However, it is non-significant when the NOS variables depict misinformed ideas about science. Furthermore, the comparison of the two student cohorts reveals that two years of science instruction do not seem to contribute to advancing students’ NOS conceptions. Finally, some interpretations and consequences of these results for scientific literacy, teaching NOS (paying attention both to informed and misinformed ideas), for connecting NOS with general epistemic knowledge, and assessing CRT skills are discussed.

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Introduction

Among other objectives, school science education perennially aims to improve scientific literacy for all, which involves being useful and functional for making adequate and sound personal and social daily life decisions. An essential component of scientific literacy is the knowledge “about” science, that is, knowledge about how science works and validates its knowledge and intervenes in the world (along with technology). This study focuses on the knowledge about science, which is often referred to in the literature as nature of science (NOS), scientific practice, ideas about science, etc., in turn, related to a continuous innovative teaching tradition (Vesterinen et al., 2014 ; Khishfe, 2012 ; Lederman, 2007 ; Matthews, 2012 ; McComas, 1996 ; Olson, 2018 ; among others).

On the other hand, some international reports and experts state that critical thinking (CRT) skills are key and transversal competencies for all educational levels, subjects and jobs in the 21st century. For instance, the European Union ( 2014 ) proposes seven key competencies that require developing a set of transversal skills, namely CRT, creativity, initiative, problem-solving, risk assessment, decision-making, communication and constructive management of emotions. In the same vein, the National Research Council ( 2012 ) proposes the transferable knowledge and skills for life and work, which explicitly details the following skills: argumentation, problem-solving, decision-making, analysis, interpretation, creativity, and others. In short, these and many other proposals converge in pointing out that teaching students to think and educating in CRT skills is an innovative and significant challenge for 21st century education and, of course, for science education. The CRT construct has been widely developed within psychological research. Yet, the field is complex, and terminologically bewildering (i.e., higher-order skills, cognitive skills, thinking skills, CRT, and other terms are used interchangeably), and some controversies are still unresolved. For instance, scholars do not agree on a common definition of CRT, and the most appropriate set of skills and dispositions to depict CRT is also disputed. As the differences among scholars still persist, the term CRT will be adopted hereafter to generally describe the variety of higher-order thinking skills that are usually associated in the CRT literature.

Further, some science education research currently suggests connections between NOS and CRT, arguing that CRT skills and NOS knowledge are related. Some claim that thinking skills are key to learning NOS (Erduran & Kaya, 2018 ; Ford & Yore, 2014 ; García-Mila & Andersen, 2008 ; Simonneaux, 2014 ), and specifically, that argumentation skills may enhance NOS understanding (Khishfe et al., 2017 ). In contrast, as argumentation skills are a key competence for the construction and validation of scientific knowledge, other studies claim that NOS knowledge (i.e., understanding the differences between data and claims) is also key to learning CRT skills such as argumentation (Allchin & Zemplén, 2020 ; Greene et al., 2016 ; Settlage & Southerland, 2020 ). Both directions of this intuitive relationship between CRT skills and NOS are fruitful ways to enhance scientific literacy and general learning. Hence, this study aims to empirically explore the NOS-CRT relationship, as the prior literature is somewhat mystifying and its contributions are limited, as will be shown below.

Theoretical contextualization

This study copes with two different, vast and rich realms of research, namely NOS and CRT, and their theoretical frameworks: the interdisciplinary context of philosophy, sociology, and history of science and science education for NOS; and psychology and general education for CRT skills. Both frameworks are summarized below to meet the journal space limitations.

Under the NOS label, science education has developed a fertile and vast realm of “knowledge about scientific knowledge and knowing”, which is obviously a particular case of human thinking, and probably the most developed to date. NOS represents the meta-cognitive, multifaceted and dynamic knowledge about what science is and how science works as a social way of knowing and explaining the natural world (knowledge construction and validation). This knowledge has been interdisciplinarily elaborated from history, philosophy, sociology of science and technology, and other disciplines. Scholars raised many and varied NOS issues (Matthews, 2012 ), which are relevant to scientific research and widely surpass the reduced consensus view (Lederman, 2007 ). Despite NOS complexity, it has been systematized across two broad dimensions: epistemological and social (Erduran & Dagher, 2014 ; Manassero-Mass & Vazquez-Alonso, 2019 ). The epistemological dimension refers to the principles and values underlying knowledge construction and validation, which are often described as the scientific method, empirical basis, observation, data and inference, tentativeness, theory and law, creativity, subjectivity, demarcation, and many others. The social dimension refers to the social construction of scientific knowledge and its social impact. It often deals with the scientific community and institutions, social influences, and general science-technology-society interactions (peer evaluation, communication, gender, innovation, development, funding, technology, psychology, etc.).

From its beginning, NOS research agrees that students (and teachers) hold inadequate and misinformed beliefs on NOS issues across different educational levels and contexts. Further, researchers agree that effective NOS teaching requires explicit and reflective methods to overcome the many learning barriers (Bennássarr et al., 2010 ; García et al., 2011 ; Cofré et al., 2019 ; Deng et al., 2011 ). These barriers relate to the basic processes of gathering (observation) and elaborating (analysis) data, decision-making in science, and specifically, the inability to differentiate facts and explanations and adequately coordinate evidence, justifications, arguments and conclusions; the lack of elementary meta-cognitive and self-regulation skills (i.e., the quick jump to conclusions as self-evident); the introduction of personal opinions, inferences, and reinterpretations and the dismissal of the counter-arguments or evidence that may contradict personal ideas (García-Mila & Andersen, 2008 ; McDonald & McRobbie, 2012 ).

As these barriers point directly to the general abilities involved in thinking (observation, analysis, answering questions, solving problems, decision-making and the like), researchers attribute those difficulties to the lack of the cognitive skills involved in the adequate management of the barriers, whose higher-order cognitive nature corresponds to many CRT skills (Kolstø, 2001 ; Zeidler et al., 2002 ). Thus, the solutions to overcome the barriers imply mastering the CRT skills, and, consequently, achieving successful NOS learning (Ford & Yore, 2014 ; McDonald & McRobbie, 2012 ; Simonneaux, 2014 ). Erduran and Kaya ( 2018 ) argue that the perennial aim of developing students’ and teachers’ NOS epistemic insights still remains a challenge for science education, despite decades of NOS research, due to the many aspects involved. They conclude that NOS knowledge critically demands higher-order cognitive skills. The paragraphs below elaborate on these higher-order cognitive skills or CRT skills.

Critical thinking

As previously stated, the CRT field shows many differences in scholarly knowledge on the conceptualization and composition of CRT. Ennis’ ( 1996 ) simple definition of CRT as reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do is likely the most celebrated definition among many others. A Delphi panel of experts defined CRT as an intentional and self-regulated judgment, which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference, as well as the explanation of the evidentiary, conceptual, methodological, criterial or contextual considerations on which that judgment is based (American Psychological Association 1990 ).

However, the varied set of skills associated with CRT is controversial (Fisher, 2009 ). For instance, Ennis ( 2019 ) developed an extensive conception of CRT through a broad set of dispositions and abilities. Similarly, Madison ( 2004 ) proposed an extensive and comprehensive list of skills (Table 1 ).

The development of CRT tests has contributed to clarifying the relevance of the many CRT skills, as the test’s functionality requires concentrating on a few skills. For instance, Halpern’s ( 2010 ) questionnaire assesses, through everyday situations, problem-solving, verbal reasoning, probability and uncertainty, hypothesis-testing, argument analysis and decision-making. Watson and Glaser’s ( 2002 ) instrument assesses deduction, recognition of assumptions, interpretation, inference, and evaluation of arguments. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test assesses analysis, evaluation, inference, deduction and induction (Facione et al., 1998 ). It is also worth mentioning that most CRT tests target adults, although the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests (Ennis & Millman, 2005 ) were developed for a variety of young people and address several CRT skills (X test, induction, deduction, credibility, and identification of assumptions; Class Test, classical logical reasoning from premises to conclusion, etc.). The large number of CRT skills led scholars to perform efforts of synthesis and refinement that are summarized through some exemplary proposals (Table 1 ).

The CRT psychological framework presented above places the complex set of skills within the high-level cognitive constructs whose practice involves a self-directed, self-disciplined, self-supervised, and self-corrective way of thinking that presupposes conscious mastery of skills and conformity with rigorous quality standards. In addition to skills, CRT also involves effective communication and attitudinal commitment to intellectual standards to overcome the natural tendencies to fallacy and bias (self-centeredness and socio-centrism).

Science education and thinking skills

CRT skills mirror the scientific reasoning skills of scientific practice, and vice versa, based on their similar contents. This intuitive resemblance may launch expectations of their mutual relationship. Science education research has increased attention to CRT skills as promotors of meaningful learning, especially when involving NOS and understanding of socio-scientific issues (Vieira et al., 2011 ; Torres & Solbes, 2016 ; Vázquez-Alonso & Manassero-Mas, 2018 ; Yacoubian & Khishfe, 2018 , among others). Furthermore, Yacoubian ( 2015 ) elaborated several reasons to consider CRT a fundamental pillar for NOS learning.

Some authors stress the convergence between science and CRT based on the word critical , as thinking and science are both critical. Critical approaches have always been considered consubstantial to science (and likely a key factor of its success), as their range spreads from specific critical social issues (i.e., scientific controversies, social acceptance of scientific knowledge, social coping with a virus pandemic) to the socially organized scepticism of science (i.e., peer evaluation, scientific communication). The latter is considered a universal value of scientific practice to guarantee the validity of knowledge (Merton, 1968 ; Osborne, 2014 ). In the context of CRT research, the term critical involves normative ways to ensure the quality of good thinking, such as open-minded abilities and a disposition for relentless scrutiny of ideas, criteria for evaluating the goodness of thinking, adherence to the norms, standards of excellence, and avoidance of errors and fallacies (traits of poor thinking). These obviously also apply to scientific knowledge through peer evaluation practice, which represents a superlative form of good normative thinking (Bailin, 2002 ; Paul & Elder, 2008 ).

Another important feature of the convergence of CRT and science is the broad set of common skills sharing the same semantic content in both fields, despite that their names may seem different. Induction, deduction, abduction, and, in general, all kinds of argumentation skills, as well as problem-solving and decision-making, exemplify key tools of scientific practice to validate and defend ideas and develop controversies, discussions, and debates. Concurrently, they, too, are CRT skills (Sprod, 2014 ; Vieira et al., 2011 ; Yacoubian & Kishfe, 2018 ). In addition, Santos’ ( 2017 ) review suggests the following tentative list of skills: observation, exploration, research, problem-solving, decision-making, information-gathering, critical questions, reliable knowledge-building, evaluation, rigorous checks, acceptance and rejection of hypotheses, clarification of meanings, and true conclusions. Beyond skill names and focusing on their semantic content, (Manassero-Mas & Vázquez-Alonso, 2020a ) developed a deeper analysis of the skills usually attributed to scientific thinking and critical thinking, concluding that their constituent skills are deeply intertwined and much more coincident than different. This suggests that scientific and critical thinking may be considered equivalent concepts across the many shared skills they put into practice. However, equivalence does not mean identity, as important differences may still exist. For instance, the evaluation and judgment of ideas involved in organized scientific skepticism (i.e., peer evaluation) are much more demanding and deeper in scientific practice than in daily life thinking realms.

In sum, research on the CRT and NOS constructs is plural, as they draw from two different fields and traditions, general education and cognitive psychology, and science education, respectively. However, CRT and NOS share many skills, processes, and thinking strategies, as they both pursue the same general goal, namely, to establish the true value of knowledge claims. These shared features provide further reasons to investigate the possible relationships between NOS and CRT skills.

Research involving nature of science and thinking skills

The research involving both constructs is heterogeneous, as the operationalisations and methods are quite varied, given the pluralized nature of NOS and thinking. For example, Yang and Tsai ( 2012 ) reviewed 37 empirical studies on the relationship between personal epistemologies and science learning, concluding that research was heterogeneous along different NOS orientations: applications of Kuhn’s ( 2012 ) evolutionary epistemic categories, use of general epistemic knowledge categories, studies on epistemological beliefs about science (empiricism, tentativeness, etc.), and applications of other epistemic frameworks. The studies dealing with the epistemological beliefs about science were a minority. Another example of heterogeneity comes from Koray and Köksal’s ( 2009 ) study about the effect of laboratory instruction versus traditional teaching on creativity and logical thinking in prospective primary school teachers, where the laboratory group showed a significant effect in comparison to the traditional group. However, the NOS contents involved in laboratory instruction are still unclear. Dowd et al. ( 2018 ) examined the relationship between written scientific reasoning and eight specific CRT skills, finding that only three aspects of reasoning were significantly related to one skill (inference) and negatively to argument.

A series of studies suggest implicit relationships between NOS and thinking skills. Yang and Tsai ( 2010 ) interviewed sixth-graders to examine two uncertain science-related issues, finding that children who developed more complex (multiplistic) NOS knowledge displayed better reflective thinking and coordination of theory and evidence. Dogan et al. ( 2020 ) compared the impact of two epistemic-based methodologies (problem-based and history of science) on the creativity skills of prospective primary school teachers, finding that the problem-solving approach was more effective in increasing students’ creative thinking. Khishfe ( 2012 ) and Khishfe et al. ( 2017 ) found no differences in decision-making and argumentation in socio-scientific issues regarding NOS knowledge, but more participants in the treatment groups referred their post-decision-making factors to NOS than the other groups. Other studies found relationships between NOS understanding and variables that do not match CRT skills precisely. For instance, Bogdan ( 2020 ) found that inference and tentativeness relate to attitudes toward the role of science in social progress, but creativity does not, and the same applies to the acceptance of the evolution theory (Cofré et al., 2017 ; Sinatra et al., 2003 ).

Another set of studies comes from science education research on argumentation, which is based on the rationale that argumentation is a key scientific skill for validating knowledge in scientific practice. Thus, reasoning skills should be related to NOS understanding. Students who viewed science as dynamic and changeable were likely to develop more complex arguments (Stathopoulou & Vosnidou, 2007 ). In a floatation experience, Zeineddin and Abd-El-Khalick ( 2010 ) found that the stronger the epistemic commitments, the greater the quality of the scientific reasoning produced by the individuals. Accordingly, the term epistemic cognition of scientific argumentation has been coined, although specific research on argumentation and epistemic cognition is still relatively scarce (He et al., 2020 ).

Weinstock’s ( 2006 ) review suggested that people’s argumentation skills develop in proportion to their epistemic development, which Noroozi ( 2016 ) also confirmed. Further, Mason and Scirica ( 2006 ) studied the contribution of general epistemological comprehension to argumentation skills in two readings, finding that participants at the highest level of epistemic comprehension (evaluative) generated better quality arguments than participants at the previous multiplistic stage (Kuhn, 2012 ). In addition, the review of Rapanta et al. ( 2013 ) on argumentative competence proposed a three-dimensional hierarchical framework, where the highest level is epistemological (the ability to evaluate the relevance, sufficiency, and acceptability of arguments). Again, Henderson et al. ( 2018 ) discussed the key challenges of argumentation research and pointed to students’ shifting epistemologies about what might count as a claim or evidence or what might make an argument persuasive or convincing, as well as developing valid and reliable assessments of argumentation. On the contrary, Yang et al. ( 2019 ) found no significant associations between general epistemic knowledge and the performance of scientific reasoning in a controversial case with undergraduates.

From science education, González‐Howard and McNeill ( 2020 ) analysed middle-school classroom interactions in critique argumentation when an epistemic agency is incorporated, indicating that the development of students’ epistemic agency shows multiple and conflating approaches to address the tensions inherent to critiquing practices and to fostering equitable learning environments. This idea is further developed in the special section on epistemic tools of Science Education (2020), which highlights the continual need to accommodate and adapt the epistemic tools and agencies of scientific practices within classrooms while taking into account teaching, engineering, sustainability, equity and justice (González‐Howard & McNeill, 2020 ; Settlage & Southerland, 2020 ).

Finally, some of the above-mentioned research used a noteworthy concept of epistemic knowledge (EK) as “knowledge about knowledge and knowing” (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997 ), which has been developed in mainstream general education research and involves some meta-cognitions about human knowledge that research has largely connected to general learning and CRT skills (Greene et al., 2016 ). Obviously, EK and NOS knowledge share many common aspects (epistemic), suggesting a considerable overlap between them. However, it is noteworthy that NOS research is oriented toward CRT skills impacting NOS learning, while EK research orientates toward EK impacting CRT skills and general learning.

Regarding the Likert formats for research tools, test makers are concerned about the control of response biases that cause a lack of true reflection on the statement content and may damage the fidelity of data and correlations. Respondents’ tendency to agree with statements (acquiescence bias) is widespread. Further, neutrality bias and polarity bias reflect respondents’ propensity to choose fixed score points of the scale, either the midpoints (neutrality) or the extreme scores (polarity), either extreme high scores (positive bias) or extreme low scores (negative bias). To mitigate biases, experts recommend avoiding the exclusive use of positively worded statements within the instruments and combining positive and reversed items. This recommendation has been implemented here using three categories for NOS phrases that operationalize positive, intermediate and reversed statements (Vázquezr et al., 2006 ; Kreitchmann et al., 2019 ; Suárez-Alvarez et al., 2018 ; Vergara & Balluerka, 2000 ). However, the use of varied styles for phrases harms the instrument’s reliability and validity, and reliability is underestimated (Suárez-Alvarez et al., 2018 ).

All in all, the theoretical framework is twofold: CRT and NOS research. The above-mentioned research shares the hypothesis that the relationship between NOS and CRT skills matters. However, it displays a broad heterogeneity of research methods, variables, instruments and mixed results on the NOS-CRT relationship that do not allow a common methodological standpoint. Further, mainstream research focuses on college students and argumentation skills. In this regard, this study aims to empirically research the NOS-CRT relationship by applying standardized assessment tools for both constructs. This promotes comparability among researchers and provides quick diagnostic tools for teachers. Secondly, this study addresses younger students, which involves the creation of NOS and CRT tools adapted to young participants, for which some test validity and reliability data are provided. The research questions within this framework are: Do NOS knowledge and CRT skills correlate? What are the traits and limits conditions of this relationship, if any?

Materials and methods

The data gathering took place in Spain in the year 2018. At this time, the enacted school curriculum missed the international standards and specific curriculum proposals about CRT and NOS issues, so NOS issues could be implicitly related to some curricular contents about scientific research. Despite this lack of curricular emphasis, the principals of the participant Spanish schools expressed interest in diagnosing students’ thinking skills and NOS knowledge and agreed with the authors on the specific CRT and NOS-skills to be tested. As the Spanish school curriculum does not emphasize CRT and NOS issues, the students are expected to be equally trained, and this context conditioned the design of tentative tests through simple contents and an open-ended format, as they are cheap and easy to administer and interpret.

Participants

The participant schools (17) included some public (4) and state-funded private schools (13) that spread across mixed socio-cultural contexts and large, medium, and small Spanish townships. The participant students were tested in their natural school classes (29) of the two target grades. The valid convenience samples are two cohorts of students, each representing students of 6 th grade of Primary Education (PE6) ( n  = 434; 54.8% girls and 45.2% boys; mean age 11.3 years) and 8th grade of Secondary Compulsory Education (SCE8) ( n  = 347; 48.5% girls and 51.5% boys; mean age 13.3 years). In Spain, 6 th grade is the last year of the primary stage (11–12-year-old students), and the 8 th grade is the second year of the lower secondary compulsory stage (13–14-year-old students).

Instruments

Two assessment tools were tailored by researchers (a CRT skill test and a NOS scenario) to operationalise CRT and NOS to empirically check their relationships. As the Spanish school curriculum lacks CRT standards, the specific thinking skills that represent the CRT construct were agreed upon between principals and researchers. The design of the tool to assess NOS knowledge took into account that NOS was not explicitly taught in Spanish schools. Both tools were designed to match the schools’ interests and the students’ developmental level; the latter particularly led to choosing a simple NOS issue (definition of science) to match the primary students’ capabilities better.

Thinking challenge tests

Two CRT thinking skill test were developed for the two participant cohorts (PE6 and SCE8). The design aligns with the tradition of most CRT standardised tests that concentrate assessment on a few selected thinking skills (i.e., Ennis & Millman, 2005 ; Halpern, 2010 ). The test for the 6th-graders (PE6) assesses five skills: prediction, comparison and contrast, classification, problem-solving and logical reasoning. The test for the 8th-graders (SCE8) assesses causal explanation, decision-making, parts-all relationships, sequence and logical reasoning.

As most CRT tests are designed for adults, many tests and item pools were reviewed to select suitable items for younger students. The selection criteria were the fit of the items’ cognitive demand with students’ age, the addressed skill and the motivational challenge for students. Moreover, items must be readable, understandable, adequate, and interesting for the participant students. Then, two 45-item and 38-item tests were agreed on and piloted. Their results are described elsewhere (Manassero-Mas & Vázquez-Alonso, 2020b ). The items were examined by the authors according to their reliability, correlation and factor analysis to eliminate unfair items. Again, the former criteria were used to add new items to conform the two new 35-item Thinking Challenge Tests (TCT) to assess the CRT skills of this study.

The items of the first two skills were drawn from the Cornell (Nicoma) test, which evaluates four CRT skills through the information provided by a fictional story about some explorers of the Nicoma planet and asks questions about the story. Some items from prediction and comparison skills were drawn for the 6th-grade TCT (PE6), and some items from causal explanation and decision-making skills were drawn for the 8th-grade TCT (SCE8). The two TCT include three additional items on logical reasoning that were selected from the 78-item Class-Reasoning Cornell Test (Ennis & Millman, 2005 ). One item was also drawn from the 25-situation Halpern CRT test (Halpern, 2010 ) for the problem-solving skill of the PE6 test. The authors adapted the remaining figurative items (Table 2 ) to enhance students’ challenge, understanding, and motivation and make the TCT free of school knowledge (Appendix).

Overall, the TCT items pose authentic culture-free challenges, as their contents and cognitive demands are not related to or anchored in any prior school curricular knowledge, especially language and mathematics. Therefore, the TCT are intended to assess culture-free thinking skills.

The item formats involve multiple-choice and Likert scales with appropriate ranges and rubrics that facilitate quick and objective scoring and the elaboration of increasing adjustment between items’ cognitive demand and their corresponding skill, thereby leading to further revision based on validity and reliability improvement. This format also allows setting standardised baselines for hypothesis-testing through comparisons of research, educational programs, and teaching methodologies.

Nature of science assessment

A scenario on science definitions is used to assess the participants’ NOS understanding because this simple issue may better fit the lack of explicit NOS teaching and the developmental stage of the young students, especially the youngest 6th-graders. The scenario provides nine phrases that convey an epistemic, plural and varied range of science definitions, and respondents rate their agreement-disagreement with the phrases on a 9-point Likert scale (1 =  strongly disagree , 9 =  strongly agree ) to allow better nuancing of their NOS beliefs and avoid psychometric objections to the scale intervals. The scenario is drawn from the “Views on Science-Technology-Society” (VOSTS) pool that Aikenhead and Ryan ( 1992 ) developed empirically by synthesizing many students’ interviews and open answers into some scenarios, written in simple, understandable, and non-technical language. They consider that VOSTS items have intrinsic validity due to their empirical development, as the scenario phrases come from students, not from researchers or a particular philosophy, thus avoiding the immaculate perception bias and ensuring students’ understanding. Lederman et al. ( 1998 ) also consider VOSTS a valid and reliable tool for investigating NOS conceptions. Manassero et al. ( 2003 ) adapted the scenarios into the Spanish language and contexts, and developed a multiple-rating assessment rubric, based on the phrase scaling achieved through expert judges’ consensus. The rubric assigns indices whose empirical reliability has been presented elsewhere (Vázquezr et al., 2006 ; Bennássar et al., 2010 ).

The students completed the two tests through digital devices led by their teachers within their natural school classroom groups during 2018–19. To enhance students’ effort and motivation, the applications were infused into curricular learning activities, where students were encouraged to ask about problems and difficulties. During applications students did not ask questions to teacher that may reflect some difficulty to understand the tests. The database was processed with SPSS 25 and Factor program (Baglin, 2014 ) for exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis through polychoric correlations and Robust Unweighted Least Squares (RULS) method that lessen conditions on the score distribution of variables. Effect size statistics use a cut-off point ( d  = 0.30) to discriminate relevant differences.

There was no time limit for students to complete the tests, and the applications took between 25 and 50 min. Correct answers score one point, incorrect answers zero points, and no random corrections were applied. The skill scores were computed by adding the scores of the items that belong to each skill, which are independent. The addition of the five skill scores makes up a test score (thinking total) that estimates students’ global CRT competence and is dependent on the skill scores (Table 2 ).

The different types of validity maintain a reciprocal influence and represent the various parts of a whole, so they are not mutually independent. The Thinking Challenge tests’ validity relies on the quality of the CRT pools and tests examined by the authors, their agreement to choose the items that best matched the criteria, and the reviewed pilot results (Manassero-Mas & Vázquez-Alonso, 2020b ). The Factor program computes several reliability statistics (Cronbach alpha, EAP, Omega, etc.).

Nature of science scenario

The nine phrases describe different science definitions, and students rated each one on a 1–9 agreement scale. According to the experts’ current views on NOS, a panel of qualified judges reached a 2/3-consensus to categorize each phrase within a 3-level scheme (Adequate, Plausible, Naive), which has been widely used in NOS assessment (Khishfe, 2012 ; Liang et al., 2008 ; Rubba et al., 1996 ). The scheme means the phrases express informed (Adequate), partially informed (Plausible), or uninformed (Naive) NOS knowledge (see Appendix). According to this scheme, an evaluation rubric transforms the students’ direct ratings (1–9) into an index [− 1 to + 1], which is proportionally higher when the person agrees with an Adequate phrase, partially agrees with a Plausible phrase, or disagrees with a Naive phrase. All the rubric indices balance positive and negative scores, which are symmetrical for Adequate and Naïve phrases, but plausible indices are somewhat loaded toward agreement, as higher agreement would be expected. The index unifies the NOS measurements to make them homogeneous (positive indices mean informed conceptions), invariant (measurement independent of scenario/phrase/category), and standardised (all measures within the same interval [− 1, + 1]). The index proportionally values the adjustment of students’ NOS knowledge to the current views of science: the higher (or lower) the index, the better (or worse) informed is their NOS knowledge (Vázquezr et al., 2006 ).

Three category variables (Adequate, Plausible, and Naïve) are computed by averaging their phrase indices, which are mutually independent. The average of the three category variables computes a global NOS index representing the student’s overall NOS knowledge (Global). The use of three categories aligns with test makers’ recommendations to avoid using only positively worded phrases in order to elude the acquiescence bias, which harms reliability and validity (Suárez-Alvarez et al., 2018 ).

The links between thinking skills and NOS are empirically explored through correlational methods and one-way ANOVA procedures of the variables of the Thinking Challenge test and science definitions.

The results include the descriptive statistics of the target variables, twelve thinking variables (five skills plus thinking total for each group) and four variables of the science definitions (adequate, plausible, naive, and global), the analysis of the correlations, a linear regression analysis among these variables, and a comparison of thinking skills between NOS categorical groups through a one-way ANOVA.

Descriptive statistics

Most mean thinking variables scores fell near the midpoint of the scale range. Four skills (classification, problem-solving, causal explanation and sequence) scored above the midpoints of their ranges, whereas two variables (logical reasoning and decision) scored slightly below their midpoints. Overall, these results indicate the medium difficulty of the tests for the students, neither easy nor difficult, which means the CRT tests can be acceptable to assess young students’ thinking skills (Table 3 ).

The EAP reliability indices of classification, problem-solving, sequence, parts (mainly figurative items) and thinking scales were excellent, good for the remaining scales, but poor for logical reasoning. Low reliability indicates a need for item revision and limited applicability (i.e., inappropriate for individual diagnosis), but is insufficient to reject the test in research purposes (U.S. Department of Labor, 1999 ). As test reliability critically depends on the number of items, increasing the length of logical reasoning over its three current items will improve its reliability.

The descriptive results for the direct scores of the NOS variables (Table 4 ) showed a biased pattern toward agreement (average phrases between 4.9 and 7.4), which suggests some acquiescence bias in spite of presenting varied phrases. The average indices obtained positive scores for the adequate category, slightly negative ones for the naïve category, and close-to-zero for the plausible phrases (the effect size of the differences concerning a zero score was low). The overall weighted average index for the whole sample (global variable) was close-to-zero and slightly positive, meaning that the students’ overall epistemic conception of science definition was not significantly informed. The overall average index of Adequate phrases obtained the highest positive score for both samples of students, which means that most students agreed with the Adequate phrases (expressing informed beliefs about science). In contrast, the Naïve overall average index obtained the lowest negative mean score, indicating that the students agreed instead of disagreeing with phrases expressing uninformed views about science. The Plausible variable (phrases expressing partially informed beliefs, neither adequate nor naive) obtained a close-to-zero average score, meaning that the students’ beliefs about these variables were far from informed. Overall, the students presented slightly informed views on Adequate phrases, close-to-zero average indices scores (not informed views) for Plausible phrases and slightly uninformed views on Naive statements.

Polychoric correlations among NOS direct scores computed through Factor attained good scores on all NOS items, indicating a unidimensional structure (but Phrase I). The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) applied to phrase scores displayed a dominant eigenvalue, whose general factor had acceptable loadings for all phrases (only phrase I had low loading). The unidimensional model obtained fair statistics in the confirmatory factor analysis. These results suggest one general factor underlying students’ scores and justify a global score representing the variance of all the NOS phrases. The expected a posteriori (EAP) reliability scores for the entire NOS scale were good (Table 4 ).

The comparison of NOS scores between primary and secondary grades highlights that the four NOS variable scores on science definitions were significantly equal for both cohorts of students, despite the two years separation. So, the educational impact of the two-year period on NOS seems almost null, given the close-to-zero differences in science definitions. This result could be expected, as NOS is not explicitly planned in Spanish science curricula and is not usually taught in the classroom.

Both cohorts answered the same anchoring CRT item (see Appendix), whose correct answer rate (27% primary; 33% secondary) suggests a slight improvement in CRT skills that sharply contrasts with the former NOS comparison. Summing up, despite that CRT and NOS have not been taught to Spanish students, developmental learning may increase CRT skills but not improve NOS knowledge. This reinforces the claim for explicit and reflective teaching of NOS, as implicit developmental maturation alone seems ineffective.

Correlations between nature of science and thinking skills

The empirical analysis of the hypothesised relationships between thinking skills and NOS epistemic variables (Adequate, Plausible, Naive) was performed through correlational methods (Pearson’s bivariate correlation coefficients and linear regression analysis) and one-way analysis of variance.

The Pearson correlation coefficients revealed a pattern of the relationships between NOS and thinking skills (Table 5 ): all thinking skills positively correlated with the Adequate variable, and most were significant, except for prediction and logical reasoning in EP6, which were non-significant. However, the correlations with the Naive and Plausible variables were overall non-significant. However, there were some exceptions: first, the Plausible/problem-solving correlation in EP6 was significant (and negative); second, the correlations between Naïve and logical reasoning (positive in EP6) and also between decision-making, logical reasoning and the thinking total score (negative in SCE8) were significant.

Thus, the noteworthy pattern for the NOS-CRT relationship showed that the Adequate variable positively correlated with all the thinking variables and was mostly statistically significant (83%); the highest positive correlations corresponded to problem-solving (EP6), sequence and parts-all (ES8), and the thinking total skills for both groups ( p  < 0.01). This pattern means that students with higher (lower) thinking skill scores expressed higher (lower) agreement with Adequate phrases.

The correlation pattern between thinking skills and the Plausible and Naive variables was mainly non-significant (75%). Only two correlations were significant in the EP6 group; the Plausible-problem-solving correlation was negative (higher scorers on problem-solving did not recognize the intermediate value of Plausible science definitions), whereas the Naïve-logical reasoning correlation was positive (higher scorers on logical reasoning tended to disagree with Naive science definitions). Three Naïve correlations were significant and negative in the secondary group (SCE8): parts-all, logical reasoning skills and thinking total.

Overall, the positive and significant correlation pattern of the Adequate variable was stronger than the mainly non-significant and somewhat negative Naive and Plausible correlation pattern.

Linear regression analysis between nature of science and thinking skills

Regression analysis (RA) compares the power of a set of variables to predict a dependent variable and the common variance. Two linear regression analyses were carried out to test the mutual contribution of the CRT and NOS variables. The first RA uses the NOS variables (Adequate, Plausible, Naive and Global) as the dependent variables, and the five independent thinking skills as predictors (Table 6 ). The second RA (Table 7 ) reversed the roles of the variables, thus establishing the thinking skills as the dependent variables and the three independent NOS variables (Adequate, Plausible and Naive) as the predictors. Collinearity tests were negative for all RAs through tolerance, variance inflation factor and condition index statistics.

The first RA (Table 6 ) showed that the NOS Adequate variable achieved the highest proportion of common variance with thinking skill predictors at both educational levels (4.2% in PE6 and 9.2% in SCE8), whereas the other two NOS variables achieved much lower levels of explained variance. In PE6, the most significant predictor skill of NOS was problem-solving, whereas the other predictor skills did not reach statistical significance in any case. In SCE8, the most significant predictors were three skills (sequencing, reasoning, and parts-all), whereas the remaining skills did not reach statistical significance (the predictors of the Plausible variable were negative).

The second RA (Table 7 ) showed that the Adequate variable achieved the greatest predictive power, as most thinking skills displayed statistically significant standardised beta coefficients at the two educational levels, while Plausible and Naïve variables had a much lower predictive power, and Plausible standardised coefficients were non-significant for any skill predictor. The common variance displayed a similar amount to the first analysis; the thinking total variable displayed the largest variance at both educational levels (4.8% PE6; 9.6% SCE8), and the problem-solving skills at PE6 (5.3%) and parts-all at SCE8 (7.1%).

In summary, the Adequate variable and the classification and problem-solving skills (PE6) and sequencing and parts-all skills (SCE8) were the variables that presented the largest standardised coefficients and statistical significance regarding the research question raised in this study about the positive relationship between NOS and thinking skills.

Analysis of variance between nature of science and thinking skills

Further exploration of the NOS-skills relationship was conducted through one-way between-groups analysis of variance. According to performance on the Adequate, Plausible and Naive variables, the participants were allocated to four percentile groups (low group: 0–25%; medium–low: 25–50%; medium–high: 50–75%; high: 75–100%), which made up the independent variable of the ANOVA for testing the differences in thinking skills (dependent variable) among these four groups.

The Adequate groups yielded a statistically significant main effect for the thinking total in primary [ F (3, 429) = 7.745, p  = 0.000] and secondary education [ F (3, 343) = 2.607, p  = 0.052]. The effect size of the differences in the thinking total scores between the high and low groups was large for the primary ( d  = 0.69) and secondary ( d  = 0.86) cohorts. Furthermore, comparison, classification, and problem-solving skills also replicated this pattern of large differences between high-low groups that supports the NOS/CRT positive relationship. However, prediction ( p  = 0.069) and logical reasoning ( p  = 0.504) did not display differences among the Adequate groups.

Post-hoc comparisons (Scheffé test) showed that the low group achieved significantly lower scores than the other three Adequate groups. The Adequate low group scores on thinking total, comparison, classification, and problem-solving skills were significantly lower than the scores of the other three groups, whereas the differences among the Adequate groups on prediction and logical reasoning scores were non-significant.

The main effect of the Plausible groups on the thinking total variable did not reach statistical significance for the primary F (3, 430) = 1.805, p = 0.145] and secondary groups [ F (3, 343) = 2.607, p  = 0.052]. The effect size was small ( d  = − 0.31 primary; d  = − 0.32 secondary) and negative (the thinking total mean score of the low group was higher than that of the high group). Post-hoc comparisons (Scheffé test) confirmed the trend, as they did not yield significant differences among the Plausible groups, although the mean score of the Plausible high group was lower than the other three groups. Exceptionally, problem-solving skill (primary) displayed a statistically significant difference between the Plausible high group (the lowest mean score) and the remaining three groups.

The main effect of Naive groups on the thinking total variable did not reach statistical significance [ F (3, 430) = 1.075, p  = 0.367 primary; F (3, 343) = 1.642, p  = 0.179 secondary] and the effect size of the differences was small ( d  = 0.32 primary; d  = − 0.31 secondary). The opposite direction of the differences in primary (positive) and secondary education (negative) is noteworthy, as it means that the highest mean score corresponded to the Naive high group in primary (positive) or the Naive low group in secondary (negative). Post-hoc comparisons (Scheffé test) showed that there were no significant differences among the Naive groups. However, the league table of groups across the Naive groups revealed differences between primary and secondary cohorts. Overall, the primary Naive groups followed the pattern of the Adequate variable (the low group displayed the lowest score), whereas the secondary Naive groups followed the pattern of the Plausible variable (the high group tended to display the lowest score).

The empirical findings of this study quantify through correlations some significant and positive relationships between thinking skills and NOS beliefs about science definitions, as the main answer to the research question. However, the analysis shows a complex pattern of the relationship, which depends on the kind of the NOS variable under consideration: the NOS Adequate variable, which represents phrases expressing informed views on science, is positively and significantly related to most thinking skills, whereas the uninformed Naive and intermediate Plausible variables show a lower predictive power of thinking skills. Summing up, the positive significant CRT-NOS relationship is not displayed by all NOS variables, as it is limited to those NOS variables that express an Adequate view of science, while the other NOS variables do not significantly correlate with CRT skills.

The implications of this study for research are twofold. On the one hand, the variables of this study specifically operationalise the two constructs under investigation, namely, CRT skills and NOS knowledge, which has been a challenge throughout their mixed operationalisation in the reviewed research. On the other hand, via Pearson correlations and regression analysis, this study quantifies the amount of the common variance between specific CRT skills and specific NOS knowledge, which is significant in many cases. Both contributions improve the features of previous studies, as most of them investigated the relationship from varied methodological frameworks: some reported group comparison, fewer analysed correlations, and most of the latter used a diversity of variables, which often did not match either CRT skills or NOS variables. For instance, Vieira et al. ( 2011 ) correlated thinking skills with science literacy (not NOS) and reported Pearson correlations that were lower than the correlations obtained herein, even though they used a smaller sample, which favours higher correlations.

The findings reveal the complexity of the NOS-CRT relationship, which limits the positive and relevant relationship to the NOS Adequate variables about science definitions, but not to the Plausible or Naive conceptualizations, which mainly display non-significant and somewhat negative correlations. The positive relationship between thinking and Adequate science definitions is a remarkable finding, which empirically supports the hypothesis that better thinking skills involve better NOS knowledge and confirms the concomitant intuitions and claims of some studies about the importance of thinking skills for learning NOS epistemic topics (Erduran & Kaya, 2018 ; Ford & Yore, 2014 ; Simonneaux, 2014 ; Torres & Solbes, 2016 ; Yacoubian, 2015 ). The findings also contribute to establishing the limit of the significant relationship, which applies when the NOS is conveyed by informed statements (Adequate phrases) and does not apply for non-adequate NOS statements, which are a minority in the face of most NOS literature, which conveys informed statements on NOS (Cofré et al., 2019 ).

The implications of the collateral finding on the lack of differences in science definitions between primary and secondary cohorts deserve further comments. Obviously, the finding confirms that two educational years have a scarce impact on improving Spanish students’ understanding of science definitions; that is, NOS teaching seems ineffective and stagnated, probably due to poor curriculum development and the lack of teacher training and educational resources. Besides, the students’ higher performance on adequate phrases than on plausible and naïve phrases also suggests that Spanish students may achieve some mild knowledge about the informed traits of science because they are implicitly displayed in teaching, textbooks and media. However, plausible and naïve knowledge is not usually available from those sources, as it requires explicit and reflective teaching, which Spanish students usually lack. Both findings suggest the need for further attention to misinformed NOS knowledge to invigorate explicit and reflective NOS teaching (Cofré et al., 2019 ; McDonald & McRobbie, 2012 ).

The unexpected non-significant/negative relationships between thinking and Plausible and Naive variables may need some elaboration due to the complexity of students’ NOS conceptions. For instance, Bennássar et al. ( 2010 ) described the students’ inconsistent agreements when rating opposite statements. Bogdan ( 2020 ) found that epistemic conceptions of science creativity did not relate to attitudes to science, and Khishfe ( 2012 ) reported complex relationships between epistemic aspects of science and decision-making about genetically modified organisms or the acceptance of the evolution theory (Cofré et al., 2017 ; Sinatra, et al., 2003 ). Thus, a tentative interpretation of those paradoxical relationships is elaborated.

Higher-thinking-skill students might develop better quality reflections that elicit more confident and higher scores on NOS phrases than lower-thinking-skill students. The latter tend toward less confident and low-quality reflection, which may elicit intermediate, less polarized scores. On average, this differential pattern explains the complex pattern of relationships between CRT and NOS variables. For the Adequate phrases (where the rubric assigns the best indices to the highest scores), higher-thinking students will achieve higher NOS indices than lower-thinking students, explaining the observed positive CRT-NOS correlations in the Adequate variables and the ANOVA results. On the other hand, when Naive and, especially, Plausible phrases are involved (which obtain their highest indices at low and intermediate scores, respectively), the differential response pattern would lead the lower-thinking students to achieve higher NOS indices than the higher-thinking students, thus shifting to the observed non-significant or negative correlations for Naive and Plausible phrases. In short, unconfident/confident and lower/higher quality reflection on NOS knowledge of the lower-/higher-thinking students would explain the shift from the positive and significant relationship of CRT-Adequate phrases to the non-significant correlations of Plausible and Naive phrases. This interpretation agrees with the striking finding of O’Brien et al. ( 2021 ) about a similar unexpected higher adherence to pseudoscientific claims in students with higher trust in science, which the authors attributed to the acritical acceptation of any scientific contents. Similarly, mastery of CRT skills is a desirable learning outcome, but it may make master students vulnerable to positive polarization in science definitions. However, further research is needed to confirm the non-significant correlations and the interpretation of the differential response pattern.

As the previous reference suggests, the findings about the complex CRT-NOS relationship connect with some pending controversies about NOS teaching, namely, the marginalized attention paid to misinformed ideas or myths about science, in favour of the informed ideas, which reveal implicit and non-reflective NOS teaching, as obviously misinformed ideas contribute to triggering more reflection than informed ideas (Acevedo et al., 2007 ; McComas, 1996 ). The effect of this under-exposure is students’ under-training about misinformed NOS ideas, which may act as obstacles to authentic NOS epistemic learning, explaining the differences presented herein. The remedy to this situation and the unconfident bias may lie in devoting more time and explicit attention to uninformed or incomplete NOS claims through reflective teaching.

This study is determined and limited by the contextual conditions of its correlational methodology. First, the research question implied measurements of thinking skills and NOS knowledge; second, the young participants (12–14-year-olds) required measurement tools appropriate to this age; third, the thinking skill tests had to match the thinking skills demanded by the participant school; fourth, the selected NOS tool was conditioned by the students’ age and the lack of appropriate NOS assessment tools. Thus, further suggestions to overcome these limitations are focused on expanding empirical support for the NOS-CRT relationship. On the one hand, some new NOS issues, such as additional epistemological and social aspects of science, should be explored to extend the representativeness of NOS knowledge. Similar reflections apply to including new skills to expand the scope of the CRT tool. Furthermore, the number of items of the logical reasoning scale should be increased to improve its reliability. Overall, the perennial debate between open-ended and closed formats is also noteworthy for future research, as quantitative methods could be complemented with qualitative methods (such as students’ interviews and the like).

Finally, the main educational implication of this study is that students may need to master some competence in CRT skills to learn NOS knowledge or general epistemic knowledge. Conversely, mastery of CRT skills may foster learning NOS knowledge. Although this study focuses on epistemic NOS knowledge drawn from science education, educational research has parallelly elaborated the epistemic knowledge (EK) construct for general education (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997 ), which opens further prospective research developments for NOS comprehension and CRT skills. On the one hand, the study of the NOS-EK relationship may shed light on convergent epistemic teaching and learning, both in science and in general education. On the other hand, the importance of CRT skills for NOS, and vice versa, may help coordinate teaching NOS-EK issues (Erduran & Kaya, 2018 ; Ford & Yore, 2014 ; McDonald & McRobbie, 2012 ; Simonneaux, 2014 ). This joint prospective of NOS-EK elaboration may also provide new answers to two aspects: the mutual connections between CRT skills and NOS-EK issues and the EK assessment tools that may also contribute to advancing the evaluation of CRT skills and NOS.

Data availability

The Spanish State Research Agency and the University of the Balearic Islands hold the property of all data and materials of this study, which may be available under reasonable request to them.

Code availability

Not applicable.

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Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This study is part of a research project funded by Grant No EDU2015-64642-R of the Spanish State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund, European Union.

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Manassero-Mas, M.A., Vázquez-Alonso, Á. An empirical analysis of the relationship between nature of science and critical thinking through science definitions and thinking skills. SN Soc Sci 2 , 270 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00546-x

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00546-x

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