- Year 2018
- NSF Award #1540699
- Registration Current Noyce Scholar
- First Name Seth
- Last Name Contreras
- Discipline Biology
- Institution Lewis University
Abstract
Every day people are bombarded by media reports involving scientific claims and medical findings. Facebook, other social media outlets, and the internet at large have enhanced the propagation of these reports, especially for teens. Many individuals accept what they read or hear as scientific fact without much thought and without examining the details through a critical lens. By training students to question media, including electronic, text, and multimedia sources, and to take a deeper look into them, science educators can train their students to be more savvy consumers of information in this digital media age. The application of critical pedagogy, in this case, refers to the set of skills and strategies that good readers and critical thinkers apply to carefully and thoughtfully examine texts or other media to verify or refute the information or message being conveyed. A model for examining a variety of media representations of science information, including news reports and articles, has been designed and tested with science students in several 8th and 9th grade science classroom settings. The data show that after critical literacy instruction, students in both grades were more likely to correctly identify an article as ‘fact,’ but less likely to correctly identify an article as ‘fiction.’ This is an important result because it demonstrates the importance of rigorously analyzing data to determine the efficacy of an instructional strategy, and also because it provides a robust basis for further research on this subject to investigate the causes of the discrepancy in these results.
