Two Interventions to Improve Knowledge of Scientific and Dissemination Articles in First-Year University Students

Abstract

The representations of science in mass media have shown a significant increase in the last years. However, mass media dissemination activities can extend to pseudoscience due to the fact that not all scientific news are published with the same rigour. Thus, we aimed to develop two theoretical-practical interventions among first-year university students with the purpose of improving their knowledge about scientific studies and original scientific sources, as well as to critically analyze dissemination of scientific research in media. The interventions had a positive impact on knowledge about scientific information sources, particularly Pubmed, in addition to reducing the number of incorrect features linked to both scientific and dissemination articles, suggesting the importance of interventions focused on misconceptions. However, students showed knowledge of correct features of scientific articles, independently of our intervention, and they made more mistakes when attributing incorrect features to scientific articles when compared to dissemination ones.