SCIENTIFIC LITERACY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

In the 21st century, citizens need to accompany the scientific and technological developments that are now emerging at an accelerated pace. The information that reaches them in different manners and across different communication platforms requires processing and assimilation to subsequently be applied in active participation in society. This is precisely the point of origin of studies adopting the education-science-technology-society perspective in order to develop a critique of society's participation in the debate on the ways that science and technology should advance. The idea of developing a collective cognitive potential enables citizens to understand reality, granting them a valid direction in life and thereby making its material action on society more effective. This active civic participation in the social collective foundations should be socio-scientific in nature, that is, more than having some basic set of scientific knowledge, citizens should also hold a vision of how these skills relate to other events in society, why they are important and what vision of the world derives from them. This formulation fits one possible definition of the term Scientific Literacy. Scientific literacy, itself, represents a construct displaying an organic and not static dimension that had grown and branched out into different areas and hence the crucial relevance in tracing the conceptual developments of recent years. The preliminary results of this research account for the association of scientific literacy to a vast spectrum of ideas/concepts that range from the substantive knowledge of science that allows citizens to distinguish between science and non-science, to understand the nature of science, including the relationship with culture, the ability to think critically about science and to interrelate with scientists. This panoply of associations allows to conclude that scientific literacy has come to acquire a deictic nature as a construct that rapidly changes in meaning and subject to modification by the context in which it operates. This clearly constitutes a huge difficulty to the elaboration of any universally accepted definition.