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Science literacy is often held up as crucial for avoiding science-related misinformation and enabling more informed individual and collective decision-making. But research has not yet examined whether science literacy actually enables this, nor what skills it would need to encompass to do so. In this report, we address three questions to outline what it should mean to be science literate in today's world: 1) How should we conceptualize science literacy? 2) How can we achieve this science literacy? and 3) What can we expect science literacy's most important outcomes to be? If science literacy is to truly enable people to become and stay informed (and avoid being misinformed) on complex science issues, it requires skills that span the "lifecycle" of science information. This includes how the scientific community produces science information, how media repackage and share the information, and how individuals encounter and form opinions on this information. Science literacy, then, is best conceptualized as encompassing three dimensions of literacy spanning the lifecycle: Civic science literacy, digital media science literacy, and cognitive science literacy. Achieving such science literacy, particularly for adults, poses many challenges and will likely require a structural perspective. Digital divides, in particular, are a major structural barrier, and community literacy and building science literacy into media and science communication are promising opportunities. We end with a discussion of what some of the beneficial outcomes could be—and, as importantly, will likely not be—of science literacy that furthers informed and critical engagement with science in democratic society.

To explore narrative engagement's impacts on science communication, we examine a representative sample of U.S. adults randomly assigned to watch one of the four short documentary science films. Our results indicate that narrative engagement—feeling connected to the story world and identifying with characters—predicts a wide range of outcomes relevant to engagement and learning: greater knowledge gain and perceived knowledge and interest, perceiving science in a new way, perceiving science as valuable, and identifying with science. These outcomes typically appeared regardless of viewer demographics. We describe implications and opportunities for research into the impacts of stories and science films for engaging diverse audiences.

AbstractThis study analyzes the relationship between state-level variables and Twitter discourse on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Using geographically identified tweets related to GMOs, we examined how the sentiments expressed about GMOs related to education levels, news coverage, proportion of rural and urban counties, state-level political ideology, amount of GMO-related legislation introduced, and agricultural dependence of each U.S. state. State-level characteristics predominantly did not predict the sentiment of the discourse. Instead, the topics of tweets predicted the majority of variance in tweet sentiment at the state level. The topics that tweets within a state focused on were related to state-level characteristics in some cases.

We examined initial newspaper coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–May 2020) in the United States and China, countries with contrasting media systems and pandemic experiences. We join the context-rich media systems literature and the longitudinal nature of the issue-attention literature to expand each by providing more system-level context for explaining how media cover an issue over time. U.S. coverage peaked later and stayed consistently high, while Chinese coverage was more variable. The most prominent topics in Chinese coverage were related to domestic outbreak response, while U.S. coverage focused on politics, highlighting how issue-attention cycles differ across countries.

In May 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released the report "Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects," summarizing scientific consensus on genetically engineered crops and their implications. NASEM reports aim to give the public and policymakers information on socially relevant science issues. Their impact, however, is not well understood. This analysis combines national pre- and post-report survey data with a large-scale content analysis of Twitter discussion to examine the report's effect on public perceptions of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We find that the report's release corresponded with reduced negativity in Twitter discourse and increased ambivalence in public risk and benefit perceptions of GMOs, mirroring the NASEM report's conclusions. Surprisingly, this change was most likely for individuals least trusting of scientific studies or university scientists. Our findings indicate that NASEM consensus reports can help shape public discourse, even in, or perhaps because of, the complex information landscape of traditional and social media.