New Perspectives in Science Education

How Americans view scientific research, whether they see it has mainly beneficial or harmful holds important implications.  One important effect is on public health, as experience with the Covid pandemic indicates.   Beyond the public health issue, however, attitudes toward science and science research also affect political support for the funding of innovative programs that underlie new discoveries and technological development.  Confidence in science research also influences public debate over science policies.  General attitudes toward science also hold implications for science education, not only in terms of funding but also for whether young people choose to pursue careers in science. Accordingly, keeping up with attitudes toward science is of ongoing interest. The General Social Survey (GSS), funded by the National Science Foundation, and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, contains questions about Americans’ attitudes toward science which enables continued monitoring of how Americans’ feel about science and scientific research.[1]  One question, asked on surveys done from 2006 through 2021, is whether Americans feel that the benefits of scientific research outweigh its harmful effects.  One might expect that Americans’ view on this would be different after Covid than before, that, post-Covid, more Americans would say that the benefits outweigh the harmful effects. The data, however, suggests otherwise. Post-Covid, there has been a decline in both the percentage of Americans who see it as beneficial as well as in the percentage who see it as harmful, while at the same time there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage who believe its beneficial and harmful effects are about equal. In 2018, for example, 11% of Americans believed that the benefits of science research were about equal to the harmful effects.  By 2021, however, 38% of Americans believed this, more than triple the percentage just three years earlier.  Many of the Americans who believed this came from a group who just three years earlier had been confident in the benefits of science research.  In 2018, 78% of American said that the benefits outweighed the harms. But by 2021 the percent of Americans believing this had dropped to 59%, a 24% decline in confidence in just three years.  It seems that the controversies surrounding the wearing of masks and getting vaccinated during Covid have undermined Americans’ confidence in science research.  

Keywords  Science Attitudes  Covid effects