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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

People regularly engage in motivated reasoning to arrive at predetermined conclusions. The modern media—with highly partisan news sources, information bubbles, and “fake news”—has amplified this problem worldwide. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop thinkers who reason well in this complex world, including reasoning about scientific issues that matter deeply to society. This theoretical symposium convenes experts in science education, epistemic cognition, and philosophy of education to propose new instructional approaches for science. These approaches are designed specifically to enable people to reason well about scientific matters in a “post-truth” world that strongly encourages motivated reasoning. These papers update current instructional approaches in science to better address the roles of individuals and groups in 21st-century knowledge societies.

Sub Unit

• Division C - Learning and Instruction / Division C - Section 1d: Science

Chairs

• Sarit Barzilai, University of Haifa

• Clark A. Chinn, Rutgers University

Papers

• Evaluating Sources of Scientific Evidence in the Post-Truth Era - Gale M. Sinatra, University of Southern California

• The Virtuous Scientist Project: Intellectual Virtues, Epistemic Reasoning, and Science Identity - Daniel Lapsley, University of Notre Dame; Dominic Chaloner, University of Notre Dame

• We Were Promised Jet Packs, but Still: Science as an Epistemic Authority in Our Modern World - Dorothe Kienhues, University of Muenster; Rainer F. Bromme, University of Münster

• Getting Over "Truth," or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Truth World - Noah Weeth Feinstein, University of Wisconsin - Madison; David Isaac Waddington, Concordia University

• Teaching Scientific Thinking in a Post-Truth World - Clark A. Chinn, Rutgers University; Sarit Barzilai, University of Haifa

Discussant

• Iris Tabak, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev