Percepción de la ciencia pre y post-pandemia: un estudio de caso sobre la comunicación científica en la didáctica de la Educación Secundaria

Abstract

Social perception of science is a multi-faceted concept that helps to understand the evolving relations between the knowledge ecosystem and the public opinions and views on it. Science communication is a key aspect of science perception as a flow of information from science, research and innovation professionals to civil society that helps to shape its conceptions/opinions. This work is framed into a science outreach activity, in which scientists directly interacted with secondary educational centres, to analyse the effect of scientific communication as a didactic methodology. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we hypothesised that this could have affected these students' perception of science. We used grouped-longitudinal quantitative methodology to address this hypothesis and evaluated the changes in perception of science through a survey scored twice; firstly, after a scientific communication (pre-pandemic) and secondly, after students returned to classes (post-pandemic). Results showed COVID-19 pandemic has positively influenced the interest in science in society. Interestingly, students declared a loss of confidence in scientific integrity due to a lack of transparency of the scientific Hachetetepé.