Intergenerational Bridge: Linking Fake News Evaluation with Attitude Toward Science

Post-truth misinformation undermines trust in science; schools may foster “information resilience” by combining evaluative competence with awareness of societal harms. Data from a 2025 survey conducted as part of the oooScience! project were used to compare teachers’ and students’ responses (N = 1,071; teachers n = 246, upper-secondary students n = 825) on seven Likert-type statements measuring perceived misinformation-evaluation competence, perceived societal/democratic threat, and the perceived protective role of comprehensible science communication. Attitudes towards science were assessed using a 15-item semantic differential (lower scores indicate more positive attitudes). Teachers scored higher on a core fake-news composite (g = 0.86) and on a teaching/communication composite (g = 0.61). Overall attitudes towards science were moderately positive and did not differ significantly on the global index. However, teachers rated science’s societal utility more positively, whereas students rated status/visibility aspects more positively. Correlational and moderated regression analyses showed that FN_teaching predicted more favourable science attitudes among students, whereas associations among teachers were negligible. Results suggest an instructional “visibility gap”: making verification practices and comprehensible science communication more explicit may strengthen students’ information resilience and trust in science.