Tag Archives: scientific misinformation

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.

An important report from Stanford

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Science Education in an Age of Misinformation is an important new report from Stanford University. We welcome this report, especially because the authors reached the same conclusion that we have, namely that national and state science education standards need to be revised in order to teach students to distinguish between real science and junk science. As the Stanford report notes, the cultural context is significantly different now than it was when the NGSS was developed and published, with misinformation playing a far greater and more harmful role than it once did.

Discussions leading to the report were led by Jonathan Osborne, an emeritus Professor of Science Education at Stanford, who was also the lead author. More than a dozen people contributed to the discussions and writing of the report, including Bruce Alberts, who currently holds the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. Professor Alberts is a former President of the National Academy of Sciences and a former Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine. It seems significant to us that Alberts, a pillar of the science community, recognizes that current science education standards need attention.

To the best of our knowledge, the work of the Stanford group and our own work were entirely independent. Certainly, we were unaware of their existence until last month. Nonetheless, there are a great many similarities in our concerns and recommendations. Among the overlaps are these: recognizing that educating students about misinformation and judging the quality of sources is vital; helping students develop a better understanding of how scientists reach consensus; developing “competent outsiders” who can make use of science; the need for greater digital literacy; reducing emphasis on teaching science that few students will ever use; and changing other elements of the education system associated with standards, such as high-stakes assessments.

We are encouraged by publication of this report and hope that it stimulates further discussion and, eventually, action to revise and improve science education standards. Our previous post offered specific suggestions for how and why the NGSS should be improved.

Research on helping people resist misinformation

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Research about “what works” in education is surprisingly thin. So it is good news for teachers and policymakers that multiple studies demonstrate that various approaches to help people resist misinformation do just that; they work.

One example comes from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). You may remember that SHEG documented how poorly most high school students are able to distinguish between fake or misleading online news sites compared to accurate sites. In one summary (2016), Stanford researchers summed up students’ ability to reason about information on the internet in one word: “bleak.”

To address this problem, SHEG developed a set of Civic Reasoning Online curriculum materials. A recent evaluation involving more than 3,000 students showed that those who used the SHEG materials grew considerably more in their ability to evaluate online sources than a control group of students who did not use the materials. Education Week published an article about this study last month.

As we developed our free one-week unit for grades 6-12, Resisting Scientific Misinformation, we based the materials on a number of high-quality studies about helping people resist misinformation. For example, a 2017 study demonstrated that educating people about misleading argumentation techniques, such as are often used by advertisers and climate change skeptics, helps reduce the influence of those techniques. Another study found that if people know what a high percentage of climate scientists agree that human beings are the major cause of climate change they become better able to resist climate change misinformation. And we relied on other studies, too.

In short, there is good reason to believe that teachers can help students resist scientific and other types of misinformation. This goal is critically important at a time when social media spreads misinformation at an alarming rate.

We wish that authors of the Next Generation Science Standards had focused far greater attention on teaching students to be “careful consumers of scientific and technological information related to their everyday lives,” as urged in A Framework for K-12 Science Education, the template for the NGSS. Misinformation of all kinds, notably including scientific misinformation, has become a far more serious problem since that Framework was published in 2012.

There are somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 teachers of science in grades 6-12 in the United States. By anyone’s reckoning, only a tiny fraction of them now focus on teaching students how to distinguish between science fact and science fiction. That is a shame. If national or state science education standards emphasized the importance of teaching students how to judge the quality of information they encounter, a far larger number of teachers would focus on this important topic.

Resisting scientific misinformation

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A year ago we posted a free, one-week curriculum unit for grades 6-12 called Resisting Scientific Misinformation. To date there have been over 3,000 downloads. Last week The Science Teacher published an open-access article about our materials, which we hope will result in additional attention to and use of the materials.

Helping students resist scientific misinformation is one of the important missing pieces in the NGSS. As we developed the curriculum materials, this missing piece became an impetus to look for other missing pieces and to write the white paper posted on this site.

It was interesting to learn recently that accepting misinformation is a bigger problem in the United States than in many other nations. As a Boston Globe article reported:

“Nearly 10 percent of the online stories followed most closely by readers in the United States in December came from [untrustworthy news] sites…. Enthusiasm for these sites in the United States far outstrips that of [France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom]. The British are especially resistant; news from unreliable sites made up just 1.2 percent of the most-followed stories among British Web surfers.”

As you might expect, there are a variety of ways to help students with the problem of misinformation; unfortunately, none of them are addressed directly by the NGSS. One approach is to use technology-rich services that help users separate information from misinformation. For example, one can install software from NewsGuard, a startup that evaluates the trustworthiness of Internet news sites, including whether the news site identifies its owners, backers, and authors of articles. A green check mark appears for users who install the software in their web browsers.

Snopes is an easy-to-use website that has evaluated thousands of claims for accuracy, which includes a list of the “hot 50” rumors circulating online. Checkology describes itself as “a browser-based platform where middle school and high school students learn how to navigate today’s challenging information landscape by developing news literacy skills,” and it includes lessons educators can use with classes. A basic version is free, while a premium version requires a subscription.

This list of technology-rich resources to help users sort information from misinformation could be greatly expanded. We use some of them and we’re glad they exist.

At the same time, students need to learn how to judge for themselves the thousands of dubious science-related claims that appear on social media, on TV or radio, or elsewhere. New claims appear all the time. Using our unit (free online), teachers guide students through evaluating for themselves a number of “scientific” claims, some of which turn out to be valid, and others not. The materials focus on four approaches to evaluating claims: a better understanding of advertising, including ways some advertisers try to fool you; asking the right questions about a dubious claim; understanding more clearly how scientists reach their conclusions (including the vital role of such institutions as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention); and distinguishing between more and less reliable sources of scientific information.

The unit concludes by asking students to investigate a dubious claim by using appropriate websites, and then writing a short synthesis of their findings. Again, we find the NGSS is lacking in asking students to investigate claims for themselves, even such timely issues as the risks and benefits of teenage vaping.