Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19 PDF

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ACADEMIA Letters Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19 Martin Braund, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa To say the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our lives more than any other global event in recent memory is fast becoming a cliché. In every country the public hav...

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ACADEMIA Letters Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19 Martin Braund, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

To say the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our lives more than any other global event in recent memory is fast becoming a cliché. In every country the public have been recipients of unprecedented amounts of scientific, mathematical, statistical and technical information. In very short timescales we have been confronted with concepts in virology, immunology and epidemiology and bombarded by numbers and equations from mathematical modelling and statistics and graphical representations of varying kinds and complexity. As countries grappled with the spread of a disease agent science at first knew little about, posing a deadly threat to life and health systems and an existential one for economies, political leaders have turned to experts, modellers, statisticians and psychologists to communicate with a an often sceptical and reticent public and to set policies affecting us all. Governments and media have often struggled to manipulate expert information to modify our behaviour in the hope of controlling the virus while maintaining limited economic activity. In achieving this there is an assumption of public trust in government advice and actions that require at least a modicum of understanding of the background science and how science operates in the socio-political landscape of the COVID era. In this letter I call for a Critical Scientific Literacy (CSL) that engages and enables personal decision taking coupled with a degree of criticality so that claims and imperatives from media, politicians and experts can be examined from a position of some capability. A recent survey in the UK showed that 42% of people in Britain get their COVID-19 information from social media, while only 22% get this from the official, local and government sources and even fewer (16%) from health professionals (Boyd, 2020). There would seem to be an information void partly created, at least in the UK, by mistrust in the government information machine itself characterised by confusing advice, often given without convincing backing from STEM information even when there is a clear consensus on this. For example, Academia Letters, December 2020

©2020 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Martin Braund, [email protected] Citation: Braund, M. (2020). Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 80. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL80.

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little explanation was given about the dangers of entering crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation (until very recently) when this was clearly known, months before it was revealed by government, to exacerbate aerial transmission of the SARS-Cov-2 virus (Royal Society 2020; SAGE, 2020). I see three aspects to establishing Critical Scientific Literacy (CSL) in the COVID era. The first involves having sufficient knowledge to engage with concepts at a basic level to interpret what is being presented (such as about infectious diseases and their transmission and isolation or mitigation and about mathematical modelling and how data are presented). Secondly, it is important for the public to have insight on how STEM professionals operate. This requires some knowledge of what Priest (2013) calls the social practices of science, such as peer reviewing research and carrying out multi-phase testing of new vaccines, drug treatments for COVID-19 and how science interacts with those taking decisions on our behalf – the interaction of science with politics. Finally there is a need to have the faculties of critical thinking including argumentation to assess claims and the evidence on which they are based to challenge many of the false claims about COVID-19 and its treatment that have been prevalent on social media. Of course an argument for developing CSL should not be confined to COVID-19, but it is useful to consider here what the COVID-19 era suggests is important to include for science education at school and college level and in science communication for a wider audience (for example through various popular media). Research shows poor understanding of the nature of viral diseases. For example, Durant’s (1989) study showed that nearly a third of people in the UK thought viral diseases could be treated with antibiotics. According to a more recent ‘YouGov’ survey, an even greater proportion of the population (41%) continued to believe this, 25 years later. Even more concerning is evidence that nearly half of Europeans believe they have insufficient biology/health literacy to make effective personal health decisions (Sorenson et al., 2015). Clearly health and biology education needs to take note and change. There is a tendency for people to see science in simple terms, providing definite answers in short time. A realisation of the ways in which science proceeds in its social space through carefully constructed, ethically scrutinised, randomly controlled and often double-blinded trials of drug treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 is important to include in any education about disease. These elements have been missing in many curricula as systemic retrenchment to canonical content of science has dominated and continues to be valued in high stakes assessment. Critical thinking is crucial for understanding the pandemic and in many other aspects of social-scientific issues affecting us all. It is important that this does not lead to a single original

Academia Letters, December 2020

©2020 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Martin Braund, [email protected] Citation: Braund, M. (2020). Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 80. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL80.

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position on a problem but that it involves the examination and evaluation of different positions. In the UK there has been a tendency to talk about action that “follows THE science” as if there is only one solution or idea that works. This is to wholly misrepresent science, which proceeds on a multitude of ideas subjected through empiricism to establish which, if any, have more substance than others. Early in the UK experience of the pandemic the idea of “herd immunity” was promoted, through which a large proportion of the population would build sufficient immunity for the disease to retreat and die out – an idea that, when modelled, was shown could lead to a health service being overwhelmed and many more thousands of deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us that science education should be globally responsive, must show how science works in its socio-political space and is socially just. Critical Scientific Literacy is needed now more than ever before to develop the habits of mind needed to address what have been called ‘wicked problems’ of the world, defined by high complexity, uncertainty and contested social values (Rittel & Webber, 1973). To achieve this there will need to be a re-evaluation of education in life sciences to include teaching about the history, nature and treatment of pandemics and to recognise that environmental degradation and urbanisation is linked to the emergence of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 (Neiderud, 2015). There are crucial decisions ahead for policy makers and STEM educators to devise education that produces a more literate population armed with sufficient information and skills to be smarter decision makers and critical consumers of information. Wicked problems such as COVID-19 will surely proliferate but will be those that educated future generations must try to solve. Many of the ideas in this letter are expanded on with examples from the communication of health and policy information in the UK in an article in the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education (Braund, 2021).

References Boyd, J. (2020). The UK coronavirus survey. Brandwatch, 4 May. Available at: https:/ /www.brandwatch.com/blog/react-british-uk-public-coronavirus-survey/. Accessed 10th October 2020. Braund, M. (2021). Critical STEM Literacy and the COVID‑19 Pandemic, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Published online first: http://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/s42330-021-00150-w DoI: 10.1007/s42330-021-00150-w Durant, J. R., Evans, G. A., and Thomas, G. P. (1989). The public understanding of science. Academia Letters, December 2020

©2020 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Martin Braund, [email protected] Citation: Braund, M. (2020). Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 80. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL80.

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Nature, 340 (6228), 11-14. Neiderud, C. J. (2015). How urbanization affects the epidemiology of emerging infectious diseases. Infection ecology & epidemiology, 5(1), 27060. Priest, S. (2013). Critical science literacy: What citizens and journalists need to know to make sense of science. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 33(5-6), 138-145. Rittel, H., & Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169. Sørensen, K., Pelikan, J. M., Röthlin, F., Ganahl, K., Slonska, Z., Doyle, G.,…& Falcon, M. (2015) Health literacy in Europe: comparative results of the European health literacy survey (HLS-EU). European Journal of Public Health, 25(6), 1053–1058. World Health Organisation (WHO). (2020). Scientific Brief July 9th. Transmission of SARSCoV-2: implications for infection prevention precautions. World Health Organisation. https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/transmission-of-sars-cov-2-implicationsfor-infection-prevention-precautions Accessed 15 July 2020. YouGov. (2014). 41% of adults think antibiotics kill viruses https://yougov.co.uk/topics/ politics/articles-reports/2014/07/08/41-adults-think-antibiotics-kill-viruses. Accessed 6th October 2020.

Martin Braund is Honorary Fellow at the University of York, UK and Professorial Research Associate at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

Academia Letters, December 2020

©2020 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Martin Braund, [email protected] Citation: Braund, M. (2020). Critical Scientific Literacy in the Era of COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 80. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL80.

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