Publishing research on social media is not the same as communicating it effectively. Between transferring an academic title to LinkedIn and crafting a message that is understandable, rigorous, and relevant to different audiences lies a series of decisions concerning language, formats, sources, ethics, interaction, and design.
The article by Dieter Reynaldo Fuentes Cancell, Odiel Estrada-Molina, and Mónica Gutiérrez-Ortega takes this distinction as its starting point to address a competence that remains insufficiently defined in university education: the ability of faculty members to communicate scientific knowledge through digital networks with sound media literacy judgment, rather than technological proficiency alone.
The study proposes two assessment instruments: one focused on the general use of social media and another specifically adapted to LinkedIn. Both combine the Reference Framework for Digital Teaching Competence with a media literacy model encompassing six areas: language, technology, interaction, production and dissemination, ideology and values, and aesthetics.
The initial validation, conducted through a theoretical review, the judgment of thirty experts, and exploratory factor analysis, produced high reliability results. At the same time, the empirical grouping of certain dimensions reveals something significant: in practice, producing content, managing a platform’s functions, and interacting with its communities are not separate activities, but parts of the same communicative process.
The value of the study does not lie solely in the availability of new scales. Its most productive contribution is to turn digital science communication into an area open to diagnosis, training, and institutional recognition. Universities could use these instruments to identify faculty development needs, design training pathways, and reconsider how much value they assign to knowledge transfer beyond academic publications.
The evidence obtained is still preliminary and will need to be tested with larger samples, but it raises a question that is difficult to avoid: if open science requires knowledge to circulate, it also requires us to learn how to communicate it without trivializing it, to verify it before sharing it, and to adapt it without sacrificing precision.
---
How to Cite: Fuentes Cancell, D. R., Estrada Molina, O., & Gutiérrez Ortega, M. (2026). Teachers and science communication on social media: development and initial validation of assessment instruments. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 29(1), 133–159. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.45461
