Despite growing interest in community-level science literacy, most studies focus on communities of interest who come together through particular science, environmental or health-related goals. We examine a pre-existing community—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel—with a particular history and politics vis-à-vis science, technology, and medicine. First, we show how Haredi cosmologies and culture come together to critique science as an epistemology while engaging with science as a technology. Then, we demonstrate how community-based medical experts serve as both science-related knowledge mediators and gatekeepers. Whereas Haredi Jews are constantly critiqued for their low levels of individual secular and science education, these community-based webs of knowledge seemingly position Haredi individuals with knowledge that surpasses the average “secular” Israeli. This case study develops unique analytical tools in the growing field of community-level science literacy, while pushing forward conversations about self-ascribed experts, knowledge gatekeeping, and the socio-political contexts of group critiques of science.

Social networks are becoming powerful agents mediating between science and the public. Considering the public tendency to associate science with men makes investigating representations of female scientists in social media important. Here we set out to find whether the commenting patterns to text-based science communication are similar. To examine these, we collected and analyzed posts (165) and their comments (10,006) published between 2016 and 2018 on an Israeli popular science Facebook page. We examined post characteristics as well as the relevance and sentiment of comments. Several gendered differences in commenting patterns emerged. Posts published by female scientists received more irrelevant and fewer relevant comments. Female scientists received more hostile and positive comments. These findings are consistent with results of previous research, but also demonstrate a more nuanced understanding that when female scientists write using scientific jargon (usually an unwanted feature of popular science writing), they received less hostile comments and were given less advice.

John Durant has spent his entire career in the broad field of public engagement with science and technology. In the 1990s, he was Assistant Director and Head of Science Communication at the Science Museum, London, where he led the creation of The Wellcome Wing, and before joining Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was Executive Director of At-Bristol, a new science center in the west of England. He is currently The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum, an Adjunct Professor in the Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT, and a Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard University. Thirty years after the journal’s foundation, the term “Public understanding of science” itself is associated by many researchers with a specific model that they oppose.

For the past few decades science education aimed to prepare non-scientists to make sense of science in their daily lives, to be critical consumers of science information, and to make informed decisions about scientific issues (Roberts & Bybee, 2014). This goal of inclusive science education for non-scientists is termed “science literacy” (Hurd, 1958). “Science education for all” can be justified if it offers value for all rather than just for the minority who will become scientists (Osborne & Dillon, 2008). What is this value?

Public participation in scientific research has been gaining popularity among citizens and scientists alike in recent decades. This creates new opportunities for learning and creation of scientific knowledge as well as for social and political change. Projects involving public in scientific research have developed in a variety of disciplines, creating a range of models for citizen and community science. Acquittance with the different models can support researchers and communities in choosing the appropriate model and getting the most out of a collaboration. This review also presents some of the many benefits of public participation in research for society, science and the environment, and then go to demonstrate the benefits of different models using three projects differing in the degree of public management and levels of organization.

Argumentation skills are important for informed decision-making, especially in everyday life when engaging with science. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is an ideal opportunity to study laypeople’s use of argumentation skills when engaging with a scientific issue daily, while making relevant decisions that affect their families and society. This study frames the pandemic as a Socio-Scientific Issue (SSI)—a scientific issue with links to several social science disciplines (economics, politics, and sociology). The current study explores decision making and argumentation in the context of COVID-19 among the Israeli public as well as the connection between demographic characteristics, scientific knowledge and education and the quality of their argumentations. An online survey to examine responses to 2 specifically designed social dilemmas was conducted in April 2020 (n = 439). Our findings suggest that laypeople tend to use justifications that were classified as ‘scientific argumentation’ but we could not demonstrate a connection between demographic characteristics, scientific knowledge and decision making. We did find a positive connection between peoples’ perception of control over the situation and their compliance with the official guidelines. As a relevant Socio-Scientific Issue (SSI), COVID-19 stretched to the limit the need for public argumentation with changing scientific and medical information.

In a world that is becoming more technological and science-driven, scientists’ ability to communicate their research and its importance to different publics, stakeholders, and peers outside their discipline is crucial. However, during their education, most scientists are not trained in how to communicate their science in an accessible way to diverse audiences. In response, numerous formats of science communication training programs have developed. In this chapter, we describe and evaluate three science communication training programs to develop writing skills. We characterize the role science communication training programs can potentially play as professional development for practicing scientists.

The Internet has potential to alleviate inequality in general and specifically with respect to science literacy. Nevertheless, digital divides persist in online access and use, as well as in subsequent social outcomes. Among these, the “language divide” partly determines how successful users are in their Internet use depending on their proficiency in languages, and especially in English. To examine whether the quality of online scientific information varies between languages when conducting searches from the same country, we compared online search results regarding scientific terms in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Findings indicate that searches in English yielded overall higher quality results, compared with Hebrew and Arabic, but mostly in pedagogical aspects, rather than scientific ones. Clustering the results by language yielded better separation than clustering by scientific field, pointing to a “language divide” in access to online science content. We argue that scientific communities and institutions should mitigate this language divide.

In the first months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic became a top concern worldwide, media coverage became full of information that demands mathematical literacy, or numeracy, to interpret. In this study, we examine the public’s understanding of mathematical notions that are required for understanding the pandemic and predicting its spread. We also explore its correlations with several variables: age group and gender, educational attainment in mathematics, and mathematics identity. To do so, we conducted a cross-sectional survey focusing on mathematical knowledge relevant to the pandemic. The survey was distributed to a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population (n = 439). Findings showed that participants’ educational attainment in mathematics was positively correlated with their success in the mathematical media literacy tasks. However, even those with high attainment levels did not always perform well. Moreover, the explanatory variable with the strongest relationship to mathematical media literacy was found to be participants’ mathematical identity. These results suggest that school mathematics, especially in its high levels, may prepare adults to understand critical information important for their well-being, such as at a time of global pandemic. However, they also demonstrate that a weak mathematical identity may significantly hinder adults’ engagement with such information.