Publication Date
12-8-2020
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Frontiers in Psychology
Volume
11
DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2020.572744
Abstract
Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information.
Keywords
argumentation, digital literacy, epistemic cognition, multiple documents literacy, online engagement with scientific information, scientific literacy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Teacher Education
Recommended Citation
Friederike Hendriks, Elisabeth Mayweg-Paus, Mark Felton, Kalypso Iordanou, Regina Jucks, and Maria Zimmermann. "Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review" Frontiers in Psychology (2020). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.572744
Comments
This is the Version of Record and can also be read online here.