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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:41PM
There are no "good old days".
Literacy is a basic skill and important, but it's not impressive. Well-educated people would ideally be 'college-ready' anyway, so there would be no need to focus specifically on that, but most of our colleges aren't that much better than our abysmal K-12 schools. I don't care about drop-out rates at the moment, since our school system is terrible and I fully understand why people would drop-out; graduating just is not an impressive accomplishment and signifies almost nothing. The real question is whether or not the vast majority of people leave the K-12 school system with a deep understanding of the material that the schools supposedly taught them. That is highly doubtful, since most of the focus is on rote memorization and teaching to the test, so it is rare for people to be guided in the direction of understanding subjects like mathematics. We are not encouraging people to be academics here.
In other words, the standards of the "good old days" are utterly pathetic. That is not how we should be measuring our success.