During a Postdoc at the National Taiwan Normal University Carl-Johan Rundgren started studying which scientific concepts are discussed in news media in Taiwan. That was part of a peoject known as Scientific Literacy in Media (SLiM)
Students need to acquire knowledge about science-related issues and scientific concepts and terms to be able to become scientifically literate in today’s society. One of the purposes of the compulsory schooling is to prepare students for future society by being able to understand, criticize and investigate what is said in the media.
Today it is easy, with the help of software, to analyze the most common terms used in newspapers that are published on the web. The data from newpaper websites were compared with the scientific terms that were used in textbooks used in high school in Taiwan.
In the newspapers the most common words used were for example DNA, cell, and tissue. Questions about health and the body capture the public interest. So do questions about astronomy. In Taiwan terms about flooding, seismic activity and earthquakes were very common. This is not strange given that Taiwan is a country affected by different forces of nature. If the same study had done in Sweden these terms from earth science would probably not have been as dominant.
Most of the terms were linked to biology and earth sciences, which aligns well with the results from equivalent studies done previously. Much fewer terms were related to physics (and then mostly about astronomy) and only 5 per cent were linked to the field of chemistry.
The question of what concepts are discussed in media is not new. Already in 1925 LT Hopkins studied 2770 newspaper articles and concluded that terms linked to biology were the most prevalent science-related terms in newspapers. Carl-Johan Rundgren says this it would be interesting to do the analysis again and compare the most common scientific terms in news media between different years. It would also be interesting to do the same study in Sweden because the local perspective says a lot about the culture and society.
The information that comes out of these studies can be important for authors of textbooks to have in mind says Carl-Johan Rundgren. Some concepts, such as evolution, that are central in the school curricula were hardly mentioned in the media in the study. But that does not mean we should change the curricula. The curriculum content should be decided based on students’ need for the future, not based on perhaps short-lived media interest for certain topics. However, an updated picture of what topics and concepts are currently discussed in the public debate could be used as an inspiration for teachers and could even help in making education more relevant.
