Educating about radiation risks in high schools: towards improved public understanding of the complexity of low-dose radiation health effects

Promoting engineering students' social responsibility and willingness to act on socioscientific issues

Background

Despite increasing awareness of the importance of promoting the social responsibility of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals, few intervention programs have been developed to enhance the social responsibility of college students or adults in the STEM fields. In this paper, we introduced a new instructional program, called ENACT (engage, navigate, anticipate, conduct, and take action) and examined whether the program increased the social responsibility among safety engineering students (N = 46) recruited from a university located in a southern metropolitan area of South Korea.

Results

In the ENACT program, the college students selected and explored socioscientific issues (SSIs) of their own interest then autonomously engaged in scientific and engineering group projects spanning a semester where they developed solutions to the SSIs and shared them with their communities. At the conclusion of the intervention in this study, they displayed an increased social responsibility regarding the consideration of societal needs and demands, civic engagement and services, and participation in policy decision-making. Social responsibility scores measured after the intervention (post-test) correlated with students' willingness to voluntarily participate in projects involving SSIs. In addition, the intervention effects were more pronounced for the students who initially had medium and low social responsibility scores.

Conclusions

We have shown that social responsibility can be nurtured by systemic instructional approaches, and increased social responsibility can lead to greater commitment to resolving SSIs. Mastering engineering content knowledge and skills is the key element of engineering curricula. However, we are compelled to incorporate social responsibility into the STEM curriculum. We believe that the ENACT model contributes toward this end.

Socioscientific Issues in Science Education: An opportunity to Incorporate Education about Risk and Risk Analysis?

Socioscientific issues (SSI) concern social issues, often lacking simple solutions, that relate to science and often also risk controversies. SSIs have become an established part of science education, aiming to teach students not only about content knowledge but also about the nature of science and to offer them practice in argumentation and decision making. We performed a scoping review of the literature on SSI in science education research, in order to investigate if the topics covered would lean themselves to education about risk, and if risk is raised in these works. Using Web of Science we identified 296 empirical publications and 91 theoretical or review publications about SSI teaching in science education. The empirical publications covered studies performed in primary to tertiary school, most commonly upper secondary school (32%). The most frequently taught SSI themes were nature conservation, biotechnology, and climate change. Despite that these, as most of the other identified themes, clearly are connected to risk analysis and risk management, few publications raised the concept of risk and the methods of risk analysis. In fact, almost half (empirical: 48%, theoretical: 49%) did not mention risk at all. We argue that SSIs present an opportunity for risk researchers to engage with educators to incorporate risk in school science education and to contribute in developing teaching materials suitable toward that aim.

How to Communicate Food Safety after Radiological Contamination: The Effectiveness of Numerical and Narrative News Messages

Food risk and the safety of foodstuffs in the aftermath of contamination are highly sensitive issues to communicate. Food risks receive extensive attention from the news media, which requires messages to be carefully drafted to minimize harm and avoid unnecessary boycotts. Once a food risk is deemed eliminated, communication efforts must rebuild trust among consumers. The latter is a particularly difficult task after radiological contamination. This study tests whether numerical messages, narrative messages, or messages combining both elements are more effective in persuading the public to consume foodstuffs from Fukushima, a region that continues to battle stigma since the nuclear accident in 2011. We employ a survey-embedded experiment on a sample of the general Belgian population (N = 1085), during which respondents are presented with a mock news article presenting either a (1) numerical, (2) narrative, or (3) a combined message and test their subsequent evaluation of the article. We find that the numerical message leads to significantly higher perceived credibility and message acceptance than both the combined and the narrative message. Furthermore, we find that attitudes towards nuclear energy have a strong independent effect on message acceptance and evaluation, with those respondents who report a more positive stance towards nuclear energy more readily accepting the message. Food risk and safety communication may thus benefit from adopting a more detached, numerical approach for sensitive issues.

Towards a strategic research agenda for social sciences and humanities in radiological protection

Reflecting a change in funding strategies for European research projects, and a commitment to the idea of responsible research and innovation in radiological protection (RP), a collective of research institutes and universities have developed a prospective Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in radiological protection. This is the first time such a research agenda has been proposed. This paper identifies six research lines of interest and concern: (1) Effects of social, psychological and economic aspects on RP behaviour; (2) Holistic approaches to the governance of radiological risks; (3) Responsible research and innovation in RP; (4) Stakeholder engagement and participatory processes in RP research, development, policy and practice; (5) Risk communication; and (6) RP cultures. These topics were developed through broad stakeholder consultation, in conjunction with activities carried out in the framework of various projects and initiatives (EU H2020 CONCERT programme, the EU FP7 projects OPERRA, PREPARE and EAGLE, the 2015-2018 RICOMET series of conferences, and the 2014 and 2016 International Symposia on Ethics of Environmental Health); as well as through dialogues with members of the European radiation protection research communities. The six research lines open opportunities to integrate a range of key social and ethical considerations into RP, thereby expanding research opportunities and programmes and fostering collaborative approaches to research and innovation.