Evaluating Sources of Scientific Evidence in the Post-Truth Era

• In Event: Educational Responses to a Post-Truth World: Diverse Theoretical Approaches to Improving Thinking About Scientific Issues

Abstract

The 2016 presidential election in the US highlighted a critical challenge that has been the subject of study in epistemic cognition for some time, evaluating sources of evidence and determining the accuracy of scientific information (Greene, Sandoval, & Bråten, 2016; Sinatra & Hofer, 2016).

New parents wonder if they should vaccinate their children, patients with Parkinson’s disease wonder if STEM cell therapy would be right for them, health conscious consumers wonder if genetically modified foods are safe to eat.

If an individual seeks to find and evaluate information on these and other scientific topics the most likely strategy they will employ is to “just google it.” However, even when employing the search strategies we are teaching students (such as checking the source) often information is difficult to evaluate. If you google “is climate change real” or “were dinosaurs and humans contemporaries” it will not be easy to discern the true identity (and motives) of the source, nor the veracity of the claims. Indeed, due to search algorithms, the top appearing cite will lead you to “evidence” that dinosaur were indeed human contemporaries.

Students today are from the “Google Generation” and yet despite being raised in the Internet era, the experts in media literacy note that, “information literacy of young people has not improved with the widening access to technology” (Rowlands et al. 2008). Recent work by Wineburg and colleagues on “civic online reasoning” (Wineburg & McGrew, 2016) showed how difficult it is even for students that might be considered “Internet savvy” to identify fake news. Typical strategies students are taught are to use to evaluate sources include clicking on the “about” page, checking if the web address is a “.com” or “.org” or “.edu” cite, discerning if the cite is for or non-profit. However, with science content, it may be even more difficult as the sources may be more obscure and the content more complex.

In this presentation, I will review the current approach to information literacy instruction and argue that it must be updated to reflect the current environment. In a further review of the epistemic cognition literature, I conclude that epistemic cognition provides us with critical evaluation tools that will be a necessary part of information literacy instruction if students and citizens are to be successful judges of scientific information they find on the Internet. Source validity is influenced by a variety of epistemic factors including the expertise and trustworthiness of the source (Bråten, Strømsø, & Salmeron, 2011). In our previous work on sourcing, plausibility of the claim has also been shown to be factor that is used to make judgments about the source’s validity (Lombardi, Seyranian, & Sinatra, 2014). Plausibility is an epistemic judgment about the potential truthfulness of a claim. These and other epistemic tools will be discussed as a means of enhancing scientific information literacy in the post-truth era.

Author

• Gale M. Sinatra, University of Southern California