Towards critical global functional scientific literacies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amid intensifying global crises—including environmental degradation, socio-ecological injustices, and widespread public mistrust in science—science education must be re-envisioned through more critical and global but also local inclusive lenses. This response article critically engages with the recent contribution by Lederman et al. (2025), who introduce the concept of global functional scientific literacy. While their intervention is timely, we argue that their framing is limited, decontextualised, and insufficiently attentive to broader socio-political and epistemic concerns. Building on Vision III and recent scholarship in critical scientific literacies, we propose the notion of critical global functional scientific literacies as a more expansive and transformative framework. These literacies encompass not only scientific understanding and real-world application, but also socio-cultural, ethical, glocal and political dimensions that foster agency and collective action. Through this critique, we advocate for a form of science education that is justiceoriented, pluralistic, and reflexive—one capable of meaningfully engaging with the complexities and urgencies of the contemporary world. Our response builds on and extends previous critiques, emphasising that science education should function as a site of collective empowerment, rather than mere knowledge transmission.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it