Monthly Archives: October 2025

A shout-out to science teacher professional organizations

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Key professional organizations for science teachers “get it” about the importance of teaching students to resist misinformation, and about why science education should aim to achieve broader goals than only preparing students for college and careers. The fact that science teachers are on the front lines and hear from students every day is one reason why their professional associations understand students’ need to resist misinformation better than state boards of education and other education policymakers. Everyone knows that TikTok, Instagram, and other social media used by young people (and adults, too) often disseminate scientific misinformation. Science teachers can help mitigate the harm.

One constructive action is that The Science Teacher, a bimonthly publication of the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA), runs a regular column in every issue called Fact-or-Faux. These articles provide lessons and other resources teachers can use to help their students evaluate the quality of science-related information, including information they find online. The articles, which first appeared in the January 2024 issue, are available free of charge at https://shipseducation.net/misinfo/library.htm.

Also, all three of the NSTA K-12 teacher journals published articles about a database of more than 70 lessons and related resources to teach students about effectively evaluating information. That database was created by the nonprofit Media Literacy Now with financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The searchable database is available, free of charge, at https://medialiteracynow.org/impact/science/. It includes lessons for all K-12 grade levels.

In 2023, partly in response to the conference and papers reported in the preceding blog post, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) published a Letter to the NABT Community encouraging teachers to include science media literacy in biology and life science classrooms. NABT’s journals, like the NSTA journals, have published multiple articles providing lessons and other resources related to finding trustworthy information and resisting misinformation. Interestingly, professional organizations “got it” early. As long ago as 2016 the National Science Teaching Association issued a Position Statement called Teaching Science in the Context of Societal and Personal Issues.

Today another article was published in Edutopia describing a lesson to help students distinguish between factual videos and fakes, such as those created by artificial intelligence. Sixth-grade science students were presented with four short, kid-friendly videos and asked to decide which one is factual. The lesson proved highly engaging.

Teaching about misinformation is not part of the NGSS or most states’ science education standards. And although science education standards sometimes claim to have broad goals, such as helping students apply science to societal and personal issues, in fact they focus almost entirely on preparing students for college and careers and largely ignore how science can be used in people’s everyday lives. No wonder NAEP reported that in 2024 only 39% of American eighth-graders reported they were interested in their science class.

Note: The entire blog can be downloaded as a single PDF file. See the link at the bottom of this page.

Some important conferences and reports

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Since the last blog post, in June 2022, the Moore Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have supported important work about science education standards and about scientific misinformation. We appreciate their commitment, as well as the work of dozens of teachers, state and local policymakers, media experts and others who attended two invitational conferences leading to papers and reports, and contributed their thinking.

A conference was held at Stanford University in February 2023 called “Reinventing Scientific Literacy for an Age of Misinformation: NGSS 2.0?” Several papers and a website were among the results. One paper is a short Policy Brief by Jonathan Osborne (Kamalachari Professor of Science Education emeritus at Stanford) and Andy Zucker called Current Science Education Standards: The Good, the Bad and the Missing. A more extended discussion of recommendations in the Policy Brief is a paper by Osborne, Zucker, and Pimentel called Where Next for Science Education Standards?  

Those two papers and a number of others related to science education in an age of misinformation are available, free of charge, at https://sciedandmisinfo.stanford.edu/resources.

Another outcome of the Stanford conference was that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute provided support for a conference held in July 2023 to help answer the question: What should students learn in
K-12 science classes to help them better evaluate scientific information and resist misinformation? The result of the work at the conference was a short paper called Learning to Find Trustworthy Scientific Information by Andy Zucker and Erin McNeill (then CEO of the nonprofit Media Literacy Now). That paper identifies four areas in which science teachers can and should help students become lifelong learners of trustworthy science and resist misinformation. These areas are:

  • learn to evaluate the credibility of sources of scientific information;
  • learn more about the scientific enterprise, such as the nature and importance of a “scientific consensus”;
  • apply media literacy competencies when searching for information; and,
  • become more aware of one’s own thinking and behavior.

The next post on this blog will identify some of the impressive steps that have been taken by science teacher professional organizations, including NSTA and NABT, that are well aligned with the reports. These steps are a thoughtful response to the science misinformation crisis.