Individual truth judgments or purposeful, collective sensemaking? Rethinking science education’s response to the post-truth era

Feinstein, Noah Weeth; Waddington, David I.

doi:10.1080/00461520.2020.1780130

Cited by 61 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…As these authors suggest, diverse factors may shape what people perceive as true, such as the socio-cultural context in which people live, their personal experiences and their own judgments, that could be biased. We concur with these authors and Feinstein and Waddington (2020), who argue that science education should not focus on achieving the knowledge, but rather on gaining appropriate scientific knowledge and skills, which in our view involves CT development. Furthermore, according to Sperber et al (2010), there are factors that affect the acceptance or rejection of a piece of information.…”

Section: Critical Thinking On Socio-scientific Instruction To Face the Rise Of Disinformationsupporting

confidence: 84%

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

2021

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Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students (N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlines.

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Section: Critical Thinking On Socio-scientific Instruction To Face the Rise Of Disinformationsupporting

confidence: 84%

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

2021

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“…As a result of these constraints, laypeople find it challenging to engage with scientific knowledge online to achieve epistemic aims; yet, the context of OESI also entails affordances that individuals can utilize. Socio-scientific issues may motivate individuals to purposefully engage with scientific information, because the scientific questions are highly relevant, and are often contextualized in everyday life and societal questions (Feinstein and Waddington, 2020). Science fundamentally rests on the active dialogue about and the critique of scientific claims (Osborne, 2010), and members of the public can now contribute more to this dialogue through efforts such as the movement toward Public Engagement with Science (Leshner, 2003).…”

Section: Constraints and Affordances Entailed In The Context Of Oesimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Socio-scientific issues-from climate change to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (we will use the latter issue as an example in this article)-hold many consequences for personal, social, and civic life (Feinstein and Waddington, 2020). For such issues, defining the problem as well as coming up with possible solutions often rests on knowledge and evidence from the natural but also from the social sciences, which are well-beyond most citizens expertise (Zeidler, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review

et al. 2020

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Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information.

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“…People who are able to use carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning may not make decisions consistent with supporting effective means of addressing global climate change, but those without access to carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning cannot; they lack the capacity to understand the likely effects of different choices, and thus to make evidence-informed decisions about personal and policy-related climate issues. This is particularly concerning in today's society in which people have reason to be skeptical about arguments from various sources concerning socioenvironmental issues and solutions (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020;Feinstein & Waddington, 2020;Iyengar & Massey, 2019;Stubenvoll & Marquart, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and responding to challenges students face when engaging in carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning

Covitt

Parker

Kohn

et al. 2021

The Journal of Environmental Education

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Carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning is a critical facet of climate literacy. This article begins with discussion of why this type of reasoning is both challenging and important. Results from two studies are reported. The first describes students' approaches to carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning. The second describes and reports results from an instructional intervention designed to scaffold secondary students' model-based pool-and-flux reasoning. Before instruction, most secondary students employed informal reasoning approaches including good versus bad and correlation heuristics to carbon cycle pool-and-flux problems. After instruction, the portion of students employing goal model-based pool-and-flux reasoning increased from 27 to 52 percent. This study builds on previous and current research to offer a promising instructional approach to scaffolding improvements in students' model-based pool-and-flux reasoning.

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Individual truth judgments or purposeful, collective sensemaking? Rethinking science education’s response to the post-truth era

Cited by 61 publications

References 90 publications

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

Constraints and Affordances of Online Engagement With Scientific Information—A Literature Review

Understanding and responding to challenges students face when engaging in carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning

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