Plenary Session --
Confronting Mis-Information in the 21st Century: Teaching Discipline Specific Methods & Evaluation Evidence & Creating Meaning
In this mis-information age, how do teachers teach ways of thinking? How can we design courses to teach ways of evaluating claims and discriminating between good and bad evidence?
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Navigating Science and Pseudoscience
(Randy Scalise, Physics; John Wise, Biology)
Misunderstanding science is a problem even with adequate science instruction; it is doubly egregious when the instruction is poor or filled with error. Pseudoscience is the promotion of non-science as factual and legitimate. What are the major sources of pseudo-science which today's students confront? How can students be taught to identify it? What fundamental educational goals can help students think critically in evaluating scientific claims? This is not a focus on pseudoscience examples, but rather on methodologies we can help students develop to detect them.
Navigating the Media: filtering sources
(Yolette Garcia, School of Education; Steve Edwards, Temerlin Advertising Institute)
Information literacy includes judging the reliability of information. Critical readers (viewers, listeners, surfers) must learn the distinction between disagreement and inaccuracy. Information literates need to appreciate that facts count. They need to learn to survive and to swim in the flood of information and pseudo-information, rather than to drown in it.Critical thinking requires critical reading; indeed, they are the same thing. How can we help decrease gullibility and increase skepticism without creating cynics?
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Rewriting U. S. History and the Challenge for the University
(Ben Johnson, History; Cal Jillson, Political Science)
Movements across the country seek to re-interpret or re-write U.S. history along ideological lines that challenge conventional understanding. Students will begin to come to us with distorted views of our founders and the principles on which they forged the nation, as well as contrarian views of our more recent history. How should we confront this issue in our own classrooms? How can we help students acquire the best means to recognize and correct this mis-information? |
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