The role of public science communication on scientific culture: approaches to its evaluation

In today's society its members are expected to acquire a scientific culture necessary for citizen and democratic action. Several attempts have been performed to evaluate this culture by means of questionnaires about knowledge and massive surveys of public perception of science and technology, but the effect of mass media and the activities for public communication of science in the generation of that scientific culture have been scarcely considered in those records. In this work, a model is proposed to register the various effects of public communication of science in its diverse modalities and throught different mass media, ranging from entertainment to informal learning, and according to the type of audience intended to be influenced, from massive to individual.