Ayelet Baram-Tsabari Department of Education in Technology and Science, Technion Elad Segev

1. Ayelet Baram-Tsabari Department of Education in Technology and Science, Technion EladSegev Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, Keele University, UK

2. מטרת המחקר לאפיין את היתרונות והחסרונות של שני כלים מבוססי אינטרנט לזיהוי מגמות של עניין הציבור במדע

3. רקע תיאורטי: אוריינות מדעית • Benefits to science; national economies; national power and influence; individuals; democracy and society; as well as intellectual, aesthetic, and moral benefits (Thomas and Durant, 1987). • S&T are involved in ever increasing parts of our lives, but the degree of public ignorance in science is distressing, and many do not reliably distinguish between scientific and nonscientific knowledge claims (National Science Board, 2008) • After over a decade of efforts to improve scientific literacy among the general population, mainly through the formal school system, surveys suggest that little has been achieved (Miller, 2004)

4. עניין והנעה פנימית ללמידה • Apowerful motivator (Deci, 1992), with content specificity (Krapp, 2002) • A form of intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) • Positive relationships to a wide range of learning indicators (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002) • Plays a role in learning: contribution to students' connection with the content, allowing them to maintain that connection for long enough to be able to learn (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002) • Influence future educational training and career choices (Kahle, Parker, Rennie, & Riley, 1993; Krapp, 2000) more knowledge of scientific interests and needs of lay people (“citizen science”) is needed for tailoring relevant and engaging formal and free-choice science environments and content for different publics

5. מה הציבור רוצה לדעת על מדע? • Main data sources: Eurobarometer reports (Eurobarometer, 2005) and the bi-annual American Science & EngineeringIndicators reports (National Science Board, 2008) • EU citizens: what news related issues are you interested in? scientific research 31%, Sport 40% • medicine and the environment regarded as the most Interesting topics, interest in space exploration has consistently ranked low • Americans consistently express higher levels of interest in S&Tthan Europeans and citizens of some countries in Asia research-based evidence regarding what the public is interested to know about science is quite rare and superficial

6. מקורות המידע של הציבור על מדע • The general public relies upon multiple sources for their general S&T knowledge, in particular the mass media (Falk, 2002), and specifically television (Nisbet et al., 2002) • However, when wishing to learn about specific scientific issues, over half of Americans choose the Internet (National Science Board, 2008) • Therefore, keywords given to search engines can be regarded as resources for detecting people's information needs (Murata, 2006; Segev & Ahituv, Forthcoming) • This approach was used to study trends and interests worldwide (e.g. Jansen & Spink, 2003; Jansen, Spink, & Saracevic, 2000; Silverstein, Henzinger, Marais, & Moricz, 1999), but not specifically science and technology

7. מטרת המחקר • Utilize existing web-based tools for identifying interests in science and pseudoscience as reflected by search queries • Describe the potential and limitations of these tools for PUOS and educational research • Provide a cross-national comparison of popular science and pseudoscience related- searches

8. גישת מחקר וכלי מחקר: סקירה • Public interest in science and technology was traditionally measured using massively-distributed top-down surveys (e.g. Eurobarometer, 2005; National Science Board, 2008) • Sporadically used learner/audience-centered data-collection methods: • purchase patterns of books (Schummer, 2005) • self-generated questions sent to a popular science TV-show (Baram-Tsabari & Yarden, 2007, 2008)

9. גישת מחקר וכלי מחקר: רציונל • Increasing use of the Internet for researching S&T related interests by the lay public • Googleis the most widely used search engine today with more than 500 million different users every month (comScore, 2008; Kopytoff, 2007; Sullivan, 2006; Nielsen Online, 2008). It is estimated that 74 percent of online users turn to Google first when they search for information on the web (Hinman, 2005) • Being the most widely used search engine on the web, we chose Google and its' advanced features as our data source

10. כלי מחקר • Google Trends • Google Zeitgeist

11. בחירת מילות חיפוש • A list of potential science-related search queries was constructed based on terms appearing in the Eurobarometer and Science and Engineering Indicators reports • Pseudoscience-related terms were extracted from relevant Internet sites • Database of popular searches in Google Zeitgeist, providing a list of more than 8000 popular search queries from different countries since 2004, was examined, and all scientific and pseudoscientific search terms were identified.

12. מילות חיפוש

13. General Science: Physics, Biology, Chemistry Noble-prize winners are being announced Summer and winter vacations

14. General Science: Physics, Biology, Chemistry Relatively low percentage of online users - high percentage of students and educated users India had the highest percentage of education related searches among popular search queries in the world during 2004 and 2005: more than 9% compared to less than 1 percent in most other countries

15. General Science: a decrease in search volume • The search terms Physics, Biology and Chemistry, all demonstrated a decrease in search volume during the years 2004-2008 • This is probably due to the general increase in access to the internet which allows wider, less educated, population to search the web via Google: the search volume for S&T related information decreases relatively to all the searches conducted using Google • This trend is also apparent when using emerging technology such as Quantum computing (118 times less popular search term than Physics) or a specific professional search term such as Quantum mechanics (33 times less popular search term than Physics) – both demonstrates a decrease in search volume relatively to the whole search volume using Google

16. Specificity: Physics, Einstein and Newton The comparison revealed highly similar trends of searches for the three terms anniversary of "miraculous year"

17. Einstein vs. Britney Spears The number of searches for Einstein during 2004-2008 were one third of the searches for Britney Spears during the same period of time

18. Trends in Science and Pseudoscience

19. Trends in Science and Pseudoscience • Different languages • Specific terms

20. Related popular searches on Google Zeitgeist

21. Trends in Science and Pseudoscience searches for NASA and Mars are influenced by events, while searches for Horoscope are stable

22. Trends in Environment and Pseudoscience • Surveys found that Americans have recently become more concerned about environmental quality • Among Europeans, climate change is ranked as a top environmental concern • The growth in searches for Global warming in 2007 is accompanied by an increase in media attention • In many Western countries the increase in search volume starts approximately six months earlier

23. Limitations • Google Trends provides only an arbitrary scale system, and thus making the comparison qualitative rather than quantitative. • Google Trends is a limited tool for cross-national comparison, since users from different countries use different languages to search for information. Google Zietgeist provides a complementary data on users’ searches worldwide. • Google Zeitgeist does not account for the complex interaction of the historical, social, economic, political and cultural background of users in each country.

24. Affordances Allows a bottom-up, up-to-date, authentic and learner-centered monitoring of public's interest in science and pseudoscience issues in different countries, thus allowing tailoring evidence-based formal and informal science learning environments to build on these genuine interests