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99.9% of teens do not have the knowledge, skills or capability to critically examine academic research. Hell, most secondary and high school teachers don't hav
by rmah 6y ago
99.9% of teens do not have the knowledge, skills or capability to critically examine academic research. Hell, most secondary and high school teachers don't have those skills. Thus, all you can say is "be skeptical". But that is next to useless if the student has no basis to make an assessment -- all it will do is erode confidence in the process of science. Instead, IMO, students should be 1) given a firm foundation of well accepted knowledge and 2) taught how the process of science works.
As an aside, I'd ask those who promote the idea that children should be taught "how to think" instead of "facts they can just look up" to think a bit more deeply about what they are saying. IMO, you cannot reach valid conclusions without facts. Facts are the foundation of knowledge, synthesis and analysis. Without facts, one cannot understand a topic or even know what questions to ask about it. Note, I'm not saying that children should be force fed facts via rote learning. But consider, what happens when someone believes they can think for themselves but is ignorant of topic they're thinking about?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'd expect them to iteratively learn the facts of the topic, just as the people who first discovered those facts would have had to. Many areas of knowledge are traditionally introduced that way. Of course it can't be the only teaching strategy, since many things couldn't be learned within a human lifespan without explicit instruction on the facts, but it plays an important pedagogical role. The replication crisis indicates, frankly, that confidence in the process of science should be eroded a bit. Many people I know treat scientific studies as true until proven otherwise, and the replication crisis demonstrates this isn't an accurate assessment.
- scarmig 6y agoThere's two different kinds of confidence in science. There's the type that uncritically accepts an article at face value (oranges cause/cure cancer! Time to ban/require orange consumption!), and there's the type that says "the scientific community thinks evolution is true, so even if individual articles can be criticized, on the whole I shouldn't discount it as a theory based on a single critique or mistake." The former is good to undermine; the latter bad. But the boundary between them can be murky.
- andreilys 6y agoThe reason we have a replication crisis now is because people took the Stanford prison experiment as a "fact" rather than something that should've been challenged. You can absolutely teach critically thinking skills to teens. Force-feeding facts which are often questionable at best leads to poor outcomes.