Learning to Navigate the Science Information Landscape: Students Using Sources in Science Journalism

• In Event: Learning From Others: Advancing Theory and Research on Learning From Sources

Abstract

What skills will today’s high school students need to make sense of the diverse sources of science information available today and 15 years after graduation? Today, most of us have access to science information online and in the media, whether the issues are personal (Should I consider a new drug for my diabetes?) or public (What actions should society take in relation to climate change?). The Internet will likely continue to provide the opportunity for citizens to access science news, government and professional organization reports, corporate websites, policy documents, and terabytes of raw data; these sources of information are, and will be in the future, created by agents with differing expertise and agendas. Social networking and open comment forums on news sites also provides opportunities for citizens to engage in discussion and debate. Will today’s students and future citizens know how to navigate the landscape of science-related information well?

The purpose of the Science Literacy through Science Journalism project as a whole is to engage and support high school students in science news reporting, carrying out key practices that expert science journalists utilize. The aim is to provide a long-term skill set for navigating the scientific information available now, and in 15 years. In this presentation, our objective is to examine several components of these skills: the use of multiple credible sources representing relevant perspectives, attribution of the expertise or position of the sources, and interviewing of experts and/or stakeholders.
Our theoretical perspective on human action is sociocultural (e.g., Wertsch, 1998); in this view, learning is viewed as increasingly sophisticated participation in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998).

Our methods are mixed, including quantitative and qualitative techniques within expert-novice comparison, quasi-experimental examination of our intervention, and case studies. Data sources include 90 high school student and 18 expert responses to questions regarding source use on an assessment instrument. The change measure analysis includes 825 intervention students and 268 comparison students using the same instrument. Patterns of student action are apparent in >900 student-written science news articles, edits by an experienced journalist, and article revisions; and >300 sources saved by students in a social bookmarking site. Analyses of these data yielded several results: we found that novices do not refer to professional associations, organizations, and government agencies as much as experts, that novices strongly prefer first-hand accounts, and that intervention increases the novices' use of multiple credible sources.

In addition, interviews of selected students and teachers informed three case studies, which show the challenges and opportunities that engaging learners in science journalism offers for learning to navigate the science information landscape. Our case study results show that some features of the classroom context assist students in gaining more sophistication in source consideration: discursive norms wherein source expertise and stakeholder perspectives are considered and attributed, the role of an external editor, and the agency authors feel when creating a personally relevant authentic science news story for publication.

We will discuss the significance of this research for educating a scientifically literate public.

Authors

• Alan Newman, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Joseph L. Polman, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Angela Kohnen, University of Missouri

• Cathy Farrar, University of Missouri

• Cindy Graville, University of Missouri