Effects of Goal Priming on High School Students' Use of Mechanism and Evidence Information in a Science Media Text

• In Event: Promoting Public Understanding of Science: A Cornerstone of Diverse Democracies

Abstract

Evidence and explanatory mechanism are central to knowledge construction in science. While findings suggest that people tend to focus on non-science considerations when making science-related decisions, there is also evidence that people can reason very productively with evidence and mechanisms (Sandoval, Sodian, Koerber, & Wong, 2014). One question about how people reason about science-related tasks is how differences in the goals people pursue might influence their reasoning. We report the results of a study in which we manipulated high school students’ goals for reading a science text to see how goal differences might affect their use of available information on causal mechanisms and evidence.
Our perspective is that reading a science media report is potentially a context for epistemic cognition: thinking about what and how one knows something. There is a good deal of work from both science education and educational psychology suggesting that how individuals think about the nature of scientific knowledge influences how they use science to reason about science-related issues outside of school. A general finding from science education is that people seem not to make use of relevant science knowledge (Sadler & Fowler, 2006). We operate from a situated perspective on cognition that argues a key determinant of epistemic cognition in any situation is the epistemic aim one pursues (Chinn, Buckland, & Samarapungavan, 2011). That is, the kind of knowledge a person thinks they are trying to gain, and the purpose for which they feel they need it, is likely to influence how they make sense of available information. If people are pursuing different epistemic aims, then they may make use of different types of information when reasoning.
We asked 217 high school students to read a short text about the claim that zinc prevents the common cold. The text contained statements about the causal mechanism by which zinc might inhibit some cold viruses, evidence for this causal mechanism, and non-science information one might get in a media report (e.g., a statement of school absenteeism due to colds). Students were assigned to one of three goal conditions: evaluate the truth of the claim (claim evaluation); decide whether they personally would take zinc supplements (personal decision); or decide whether they agreed that schools should require students to take zinc supplements (social decision). Participants in all three goal conditions rated both mechanism and evidence statements as important for their decision, with no differences between groups. Those in the claim evaluation condition, however, rated evidence statements as most important for their task, and were more likely than the social decision group to see evidence as relevant. Participants in the social decision condition were much more likely to rate the non-science information as important, consistent with their task. Our findings suggest the social decision goal removed students from evaluating the merits of the underlying causal claim more than the other goal conditions. This suggests school science should pay more explicit attention to the role of science in social policy contexts.

Authors

• Jacqueline Wong, University of California - Los Angeles

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles