Public awareness of science (PAwS), public understanding of science (PUS), or more recently, public engagement with science and technology (PEST) are terms relating to the attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to scientific knowledge and organization. It is a comparatively new approach to the task of exploring the multitude of relations and linkages science, technology, and innovation have among the general public. While early work in the discipline focused on increasing or augmenting the public's knowledge of scientific topics, in line with the information deficit model of science communication, the deficit model has largely been abandoned by science communication researchers. Instead, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue.

 

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