Abstract
The representations of science in mass media have shown a significant increase in the last years. However, mass media dissemination activities can extend to pseudoscience due to the fact that not all scientific news are published with the same rigour. Thus, we aimed to develop two theoretical-practical interventions among first-year university students with the purpose of improving their knowledge about scientific studies and original scientific sources, as well as to critically analyze dissemination of scientific research in media. The interventions had a positive impact on knowledge about scientific information sources, particularly Pubmed, in addition to reducing the number of incorrect features linked to both scientific and dissemination articles, suggesting the importance of interventions focused on misconceptions. However, students showed knowledge of correct features of scientific articles, independently of our intervention, and they made more mistakes when attributing incorrect features to scientific articles when compared to dissemination ones.
Highlights
The Representations of science in mass media have shown a significant increase in the last years
Study 1 Regarding the percentage of students who show knowledge of each source of information, the two-way RM ANOVA revealed significant effect of the intervention (F(1,16) = 8.549, p=0.010)
Our results show that students perceive as higher reliability those sources derived from original scientific resources and classified by researches as “high scientific reliability”, such as Pubmed articles or conference in scientific congresses, in comparison with “medium scientific reliability” sources, such as dissemination made by scientists on the Internet or podcasts, and “low scientific reliability” sources, web pages with non-rigorous information or TV programs
Summary
The Representations of science in mass media have shown a significant increase in the last years. Some of the misconceptions that certain part of the society assumes can be corrected (Blanco López, 2004; Illingworth & Prokop, 2017), and citizens distance from science and technology can be shortened (Howard-Jones, 2014; Vasconcelos, 2016). This can lead to a better understanding of science, critical thinking (Eagleman, 2013), and promotion of certain social values (Rull, 2014). It has been suggested that pseudoscience can be assumed as inoffensive based
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