Scientific Literacy is dead! Long live scientific literacy!

Just about everybody agrees we have a problem. There’s too much information online, and too much of that information is false, intentionally harmful, or both. So, we need to teach people to discern accurate and helpful information from everything else, but how exactly can we do that? How do we teach scientific literacy? In a recent article, Osborne and Pimentel (2023) argued the well-intentioned “scientific literacy” movement failed because no one could adequately define what the precise knowledge and capabilities are - scientific claims are simply too complex and require far too much knowledge for any one person to be “literate” in (all or even some of) “science.” Instead, they argued we should teach people to become “competent outsiders” - people who can evaluate the legitimacy of scientific claims by using lateral reading skills and an understanding of scientific consensus, including how it is created, maintained, productively questioned, and developed over time. Education should prepare people for those moments when they encounter a novel scientific claim online: rather than asking people to evaluate the claim itself (old-school scientific literacy) the goal is to have them evaluate the source of the claim and how well the source and the claim adhere to the scientific consensus, if it exists (new-school scientific literacy). Finding trusted experts and determining if a claim adheres to those experts’ consensus is much more tractable than expecting people to have the skills to vet complex claims about climate change, vaccines, GMOs, etc. Makes sense to me: long live scientific (source and consensus) literacy!