Teaching Scientific Thinking in a Post-Truth World

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

Abstract

Events worldwide (e.g., widespread actual and alleged fake news and discrediting of science and mainstream media) have heightened the importance of developing new forms of instruction that can improve scientific reasoning in real-world contexts. In this paper, our objective is to argue for a rethinking of educational goals by diagnosing specific difficulties and pointing to instruction that can address these difficulties.

Recently, we developed a framework for identifying educational goals for promoting epistemic growth (Barzilai & Chinn, 2017). Our analysis builds on a comprehensive, synthetic review of current models of epistemic cognition (Greene, Sandoval, & Bråten, 2016) and current philosophical research on virtue epistemology (Battaly, 2008). We argue that the central goal of epistemic education is to promote apt epistemic performance, which refers to achieving epistemic aims (e.g., forming accurate judgments of claims and arguments) through one’s competence (Sosa, 2015).

To promote apt epistemic performance, we identified five aspects of epistemic competence that education should address (see Table 1):
1. Cognitive engagement in epistemic performance
2. Adapting epistemic performance
3. Understanding and regulating epistemic performance
4. Caring about and enjoying epistemic performance
5. Participating in epistemic performance together with others

Within each of these aspects, people should gain competence in three components taken from the AIR model of epistemic cognition (Chinn, Rinehart, & Buckland, 2014). These are epistemic Aims and value (epistemic goals actors set and their perceived importance), epistemic Ideals (standards or criteria used to evaluate achievement of epistemic aims), and Reliable epistemic processes (procedures that can successfully achieve epistemic aims).

In this paper, we argue that “post-truth” reasoning problems arise from a break-down in one or more of the five aspects, and that these aspects can, in turn, suggest instructional approaches. Table 2 presents an overview of our analysis of five emblematic problems and possible responses. Our full paper will address each problem.

To illustrate, here is a synopsis of one problem—discrediting uncongenial news. People often discredit uncongenial news as false or as “fake-news” while regarding news that they agree with as trustworthy and “real” (Kunda, 1990). This phenomenon can be explained in part through difficulties in understanding and regulating epistemic performance (aspect #3). People lack an understanding of reliable processes scientists and science journalists use to produce reports, and of reliable processes they can personally use to evaluate these reports. For example, they may not understand why ideals such as “fitting all the available evidence” are valuable. The solution suggested by our framework is to engage students in a new form of epistemic inquiry—inquiry into knowing. Moving beyond superficial judgments of source credibility, students can investigate science journalistic processes, thus developing extensive metacognitive understanding of truth-conductive processes. Curricula could be developed that enable classes to collectively generate—through inquiry into evidence about the reliability of different news-producing processes—an understanding of which processes are reliable, and why they are valuable. Our analyses of the five reasoning problems collectively engenders new features of instruction that will require both fresh instructional designs and new directions of research.

Authors

• Clark A. Chinn, Rutgers University

• Sarit Barzilai, University of Haifa