In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and given the huge volume of information available for the general population (being part of them fake news), there is a clear need to foster people’s understanding of the meaning of science, of how scientific knowledge is produced, communicated, and used. As one of the main aims of science education is the promotion of students’ scientific literacy, one of the issues focused on teaching should be aspects of nature of science (NOS) – which can be introduced from discussions in socioscientific contexts. In this paper, we analyse the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to identify and discuss aspects of NOS involved in the production and communication of knowledge about it. We analyse selected scientific publications and reports from the general media, mainly focused on three broad topics about the production and validation of knowledge: (i) the characterisation of the virus, and (ii) the treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, and (iii) the communication of knowledge produced from the characterisation of scientific literature itself in the pandemic period. The analysis was carried out from a model that presents a broad and complex view of science, as it addresses several areas of knowledge and specific aspects of each of them and proposes the generation of one’s view of science from an integration of some of its distinct areas and/or aspects. The results show the current pandemic is a rich socioscientific context whose discussion of social, political, economic, and ethical aspects may support students’ learning of nature of science, thus fostering scientific literacy.

在 COVID-19 大流行的背景下，鉴于普通大众可以获得大量信息（其中一部分是假新闻），显然需要促进人们对科学的意义、科学知识如何被生产、传播和使用。由于科学教育的主要目标之一是促进学生的科学素养，教学的重点之一应该是科学的本质（NOS）——可以从社会科学背景下的讨论中引入。在本文中，我们分析了 COVID-19 大流行的背景，以识别和讨论 NOS 涉及其知识生产和传播的各个方面。我们分析来自一般媒体的精选科学出版物和报告，主要集中在关于知识生产和验证的三个广泛主题：(i) 病毒的表征，以及 (ii) COVID-19 的治疗方法和疫苗，以及 (iii) 科学表征所产生的知识交流大流行时期的文学本身。该分析是从一个呈现广泛而复杂的科学观点的模型进行的，因为它涉及多个知识领域和每个领域的具体方面，并建议从其一些不同领域的整合中产生一个人的科学观点和/或方面。结果表明，当前的大流行是一个丰富的社会科学背景，其对社会、政治、经济和伦理方面的讨论可以支持学生对科学本质的学习，从而培养科学素养。