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Doctor Teaches Children Critical Thinking Skills

posted by on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-shit-sherlock dept.

stormwyrm writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @11:42PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @11:42PM (#515750)

    The usual pseudoscience:

    WHAT DOES ‘STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT’
    MEAN?
    ‘To be honest, it’s a tricky idea. It can tell us if the difference between a drug and a placebo or between the life expectancies of two groups of people, for example, could be just down to chance . . . It means that a difference as large as the one observed is unlikely to have occurred by chance alone.

    Statisticians use standard levels of “unlikely”. Commonly they use significant at the 5% level (sometimes written as p=0.05). In this case a difference is said to be ‘significant’ because it has a less than 1 in 20 probability of occurring if all that is going on is chance.’
    [...]
    This review found a lower rate of heart attacks among the aspirin takers and the difference was ‘statistically significant’ – that is, it was unlikely to be explained by the play of chance.

    This took me less than a minute to find (because I knew it would be there, this is what they teach each other...).

    http://andrewgelman.com/2013/03/12/misunderstanding-the-p-value/ [andrewgelman.com]

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 26 2017, @12:27AM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 26 2017, @12:27AM (#515765) Homepage Journal

    I know about p values being the dual of what people think it means, and therefore globally misunderstood.

    What I asked was a link to the actual documents they use when teaching this stuff to ten-year-old children, which seems to be at least partially in the form of comics. I know some adults facing progressive degenerative diseases who would benefit from this, and I'd like them to see it.

    It might save them some money spent on false hopes.

    -- hendrik