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Julia Belluz and Alvin Chang over at Vox.com have an article about a new paper in the Lancet by a team led Dr. Andrew Oxman showing how it is possible to teach children the critical thinking skills needed to detect dubious health claims.
[...] he [Andrew Oxman] began working with other researchers from around the world to develop curricula — a cartoon-filled textbook, lessons plans (sic) — on critical thinking skills aimed at school children.
In 2016, Oxman tested the materials in a big trial involving 10,000 children from 120 primary schools in Uganda's central region.
The results of the trial were just published in the Lancet, and they showed a remarkable rate of success: Kids who were taught basic concepts about how to think critically about health claims massively outperformed children in a control group.
This means Oxman now holds the best blueprint out there for how to get young people to think critically and arm them with the tools they need to spot "alternative facts" and misinformation. His work brings us closer to answering that important question that haunted him — the one that should haunt all of us who care about evidence and facts: How do you prevent fake news and bullshit from catching on in the first place?
The Oxman paper is here (DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31226-6). Orac has his own take on it as well.
(Score: 4, Informative) by idiot_king on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:32PM
I understand what the article is trying to convey but the term "critical thinking" alone has become an incredibly loaded phrase and can mean anything from a systematic (i.e. psuedo-Socratic) questioning of the material to a "Critical Theory"-esque (and thus Marxist/Queer/Ethnocentric) critique of the material at hand (which is what I and many others were taught at the University-level as "Critical thinking"). Now, the material here is specifically about health, but it is easy to extrapolate to the current mystical cloud phenomenon known as "Fake News" and taking a "Critical thinking" approach to the so-called "Fake News." I note that while the children were given simple tools of the scientific method (i.e., the notion of reproduction of results and skepticism of initial claims), the phrase given in the paper itself ("Critical thinking") is highly misleading and I think would be better clarified if a more obvious term were used.
Just a critique of the paper itself, not of the actual subject matter of the paper.