Abstract
Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information.
Highlights
Socio-scientific issues—from climate change to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—hold many consequences for personal, social, and civic life (Feinstein and Waddington, 2020)
Online Engagement With Scientific Information increased, and there, they encounter a wide variety of digital media formats, including social media (Pavelle and Wilkinson, 2020)
We review literature on the cognitive and motivational processes underlying online engagement with scientific information (OESI) that individuals employ in order to utilize the affordances and overcome the challenges of searching for and dealing with scientific information in online information environments
Summary
Socio-scientific issues—from climate change to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (we will use the latter issue as an example in this article)—hold many consequences for personal, social, and civic life (Feinstein and Waddington, 2020). To adequately deal with context constraints and affordances (e.g., the amount of misinformation present in social media), the employed (reliable) processes must be effortful Such goal-directed and effortful engagement is what we describe as OESI, and we further differentiate individual engagement (engaging on one’s own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information).We assume that individuals will not follow a specific sequential order when engaging in these two types of engagement and their associated processes, but instead, depending on the situation and the individual’s epistemic aim, any process could be the beginning of an episode of engagement and could lead to any other of the processes—within and between the two parts –, whereby the individual may even switch back and forth, commit to two processes at the same time, or skip a process. Taking past conceptualizations into account, we use the term “online engagement with scientific information” not to introduce an entirely new concept or to replace any related concept; instead, here we review this literature, to provide a comprehensive overview of OESI—focusing its context and on cognitive and motivational processes that support it—to derive implications for education and instruction
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