A study of middle-school to college-age students found most absorb social media news without considering the source. How parents can teach research skills and skepticism.
This article makes me cringe. But cringy things are often things that we must overcome and I think on the whole we need to teach our students how to overcome this.
I often have conversations with my partner (who is a high school teacher) about this exact subject. Students can’t tell what news is real on social media. And we all know from experience that there is a LOT of fake news out there. And it isn’t just students, my parents often get fooled by these as well, it’s hard to tell whats real and whats not on the internet, but my argument isn’t that it should be easier to figure out what’s fake, but that people..EVERYONE... not just students should use critical thinking skills to evaluate for themselves what they should believe and what they shouldn’t.
There are so many ‘real’ new stories from reputable stories that feature fake or misleading statistics and it seems more important than ever that we should all be sharpening our critical thinking skills. Maybe those 9 out of 10 people who eat Vegemite and also show signs of cancer also spent a lot of time in the sun (ahem, Australia) and maybe that 60% of people who have high IQ’s and are late all the time and actually just 6 people out of only 10 people that showed up to the interview for that research.
We must always remember that 76% of statistics are made up. ;)
But seriously, this is a problem, and it’s something that we need to explicitly work on, which is where the general capabilities part of the curriculum become so useful, that's where our critical and creative thinking lies and when you look at it from the point of view of something so pervasive to our daily lives - the media - that’s when you really see it’s inherent usefulness.
p.s. Whenever I think of critical thinking about statistics (or stupid statistics in general) I think of this (for those that don’t know you can click on a word that has a faint underline and it will open a link, I leave these little cookie crumbs everywhere in my posts) and of Freakonomics in general, which, if you haven’t seen it you should STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING RIGHT NOW AND GO AND SEE THE MOVIE OR READ THE BOOK or follow the podcasts or all of the above.
[Portfolio: Engaging Public Media - Media]