New Perspectives in Science Education

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the world at an unprecedented pace and still, to a lesser extent, is changing people’s behaviours, decision making and lifestyle choices. Coping with the challenges of this transforming world and understanding the changes in people's daily lives has raised -or so it is widely argued- public awareness of the importance of STEM education and the impact that scientific literacy has on personal decision-making and action. This has brought on the ‘STEM education for all’ in the foreground in that there is a need for a STEM literate public to function and respond to the unprecedented amounts of scientific, mathematical (mostly statistical) and technical information exposed to during and post-pandemic. ‘STEM education for all’ can be thus defined as someone having “… the ability to engage with science related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen” [1, p. 22] which in the pandemic/post-pandemic era would imply a critical consumption of COVID-19 information and scientifically informed decisions by the non-scientist individual. Indeed, an understanding of, and engagement with, science can undeniably affect both public and personal decisions. However, a question that reasonable arises is how realistic it is for the average individual to have both breadth and depth of knowledge to sufficient level to collect and analyse evidence and validate claims to then form rational and scientifically informed opinions on the science behind the COVID-19 or other contemporary issues like climate crisis [2]. This opinion-based paper draws on previous work [3] that questions the feasibility of ‘STEM education for all’ that would enable the non-scientist individual to make rational and evidence-based decisions about a broad range of socio-scientific issues. It is argued that this is both unrealistic and unachievable. However, the takeaways from the pandemic have highlighted the need for a widespread, functional, and meaningful health and biology literacy with some coverage of chemistry and physics, and a greater focus in critical science literacy [5] for individuals, and for society as a whole, to engage sufficiently with STEM knowledge and how science operates. A more realistic approach to ‘STEM education for all’ with more appropriate and achievable goals could thus enable the individual to function in the society and form informed decisions on a number, yet limited in range, socio-scientific issues.