Too often teachers confuse compliance with accountability. Simply following directions and formulaically obeying the plan of the lesson is not accountability. In fact, punishing students with zeros, sending the student to the dean and other such tactics when they fall short of following the procedure of learning only results in reduced motivation and performance.
Social and emotional learning as a field of inquiry has gained tremendous momentum in academic research over the past decade. School leaders, looking for theoretical constructs to build successful school communities, find the pro-social data that supports social and emotional learning (SEL) in the classroom hard to ignore.
As social media drives information dissemination based on popularity rather than accuracy, “fake news” is seemingly everywhere. Political fake stories get more press, but science fake stories are also proliferating. Not all scientific misinformation is fake, strictly defined (Oremus, 2016). Much of it is simply misleading, sometimes even unintentionally. But regardless of the label, all variants of inaccurate information can be damaging to scientific literacy; it is incumbent on us to teach students to cull through scientific information in popular sources.
Fake science news is far from new. In the U.S., it has existed at least since an 1835 series in the New York Sun documenting life on the moon, which included unicorns and bat-like men who talked and flew (Goodman, 2010). The paper’s editors thought the hoax would be obvious, but the tales were widely believed. Such mass gullibility continues across a range of contexts, from scientific nonsense regarding causes of sexual orientation spread by sketchy academics (Shermer, 2016) to supposed medical miracles — think, goat’s milk that cleanses your body of parasites — spouted by actor Gwyneth Paltrow on her lifestyle website (Brown, 2017). The Stanford History Education Group studied middle school, high school and university students’ susceptibility to such misinformation and found shocking lapses of critical thinking at all levels (2016). For example, undergraduate students were shown a tweet with a link to a statistic about background checks for gun purchases. Only about a third noted the potential biasing influence of the political organizations that posted the tweet.
Fortunately, the psychology classroom provides ready opportunities to teach information literacy and scientific thinking, and there are increasingly ready-made teaching tools. The Stanford study provides sufficient detail to use their study stimuli as teaching tools. Even better, KQED’s The Lowdown provides a fake news lesson plan (PDF, 421KB) tied to the Stanford study, with links to additional helpful sources. The Center for News Literacy at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism also provides a wealth of resources, including a curriculum toolbox.
For its simplicity, however, the tool I use most often is the CRAAP test (Blakeslee, 2004). Many university libraries provide versions of the test that helps students ask good questions about a source’s:
Of the available versions, I’m partial to the one on Juniata College’s library website (PDF, 41KB) which lists several questions for each CRAAP test criterion.
CRAAP test detractors argue that it is overly simplistic (Burkholder, 2010). But others observe that we already naturally use heuristics in our evaluation of sources (Metzger, Flanagin & Medders, 2010). The CRAAP test might help us fine-tune these natural tendencies. Moreover, the CRAAP test is memorable and easy to use — elementary school students have even used it to evaluate sources about Big Foot (Knott & Szabo, 2013). And proponents of the tool stress the importance of teaching students to think about the spirit rather than the letter of the criteria (Wichowski, D. E. & Kohl, 2012).
In many of my courses, I end each chapter or section of the course with a 20-minute CRAAP-test activity. I share a source related to psychological science: a blog post, an app, a news article, a company, an information website. Students discuss in pairs, digging beyond the source to check out any links or citations. Then, we have a group discussion for students to share their evaluations. I sometimes choose an evidence-based article from a lesser-known publication or organization, so students are not immediately tipped off by the source — say, an article on the potential psychological damage from ballet training. More often, I choose a problematic one. For example, on the website for a company aimed at treating mental illness, my students found problems with claims that were exaggerated or either loosely connected or unrelated to the cited data, and discovered that a founder’s previous company had been cited for unscientific interventions. Toward the end of the semester, each student chooses her or his own source, which I approve, and succinctly critiques it using the CRAAP test in a two-page assignment. (See Nolan & Hockenbury, 2015, for additional critical thinking activities to promote scientific literacy.)
More research is needed to determine the outcomes of using tools like the CRAAP test, but psychology classrooms seem ideal for teaching students to critique scientific sources and studying how well various interventions work. Findings from scholars of teaching and learning may one day support the view that the CRAAP test is “the most concise, flexible and memorable evaluation tool of the series of checklist tests that have been proposed since the late 1990s” (Wichowski & Kohl, 2012).
Blakeslee, S. (2004). The CRAAP test. LOEX Quarterly, 31(3), 6-7.
Brown, K. (March 9, 2017). A women’s health magazine just printed Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible health advice. Gizmodo. Retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/a-womens-health-magazine-just-printed-gwyneth-paltrow-s-1793122236.
Burkholder, J. M. (2010). Redefining sources as social acts: Genre theory in information literacy instruction. Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal). Paper 413. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/413.
Goodman, M. (2010). The sun and the moon: The remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats in nineteenth-century New York. New York: Basic Books.
Knott, D., & Szabo, K. (2013). Bigfoot hunting Academic library outreach to elementary school students. College & Research Libraries News, 74, 346-348.
Metzger, M.J., Flanagin, A.J., & Medders, R.B. (2010). Social and heuristic approaches to credibility evaluation online. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 413-439.
Nolan, S.A. & Hockenburg, S.E. (2015). Think like a scientist: harnessing current events to teach psychological science. Psychology Teacher Network, 25(4). Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2015/12/think-like-scientist.aspx.
Oremus, W. (Dec. 6, 2016). Stop calling everything “fake news.” Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/12/stop_calling_everything_fake_news.html.
Shermer, M. (Dec. 1, 2016). Beware bogus theories of sexual orientation. Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beware-bogus-theories-of-sexual-orientation/.
Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Retrieved from https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf (PDF, 3.36MB).
Wichowski, D.E., & Kohl, L.E. (2012). Establishing credibility in the information jungle: Blogs, microblogs, and the CRAAP test. In M. Folk & S. Apostel (Eds.), Online credibility and digital ethos: Evaluating computer-mediated communication (pp. 229-251). Hershey, Pennsylvania: Information Science Reference.
Kindergarten screening is a way to gauge your child’s current functioning and growth. It is a brief evaluation or assessment of several developmental domains of functioning in young children that typically takes place prior to the beginning of kindergarten. Although there are myriad benefits to kindergarten screening such as providing accurate estimates of your child’s functioning, informing you and professionals of areas of strengths and challenges, and assisting in planning interventions if necessary, it is not routinely conducted in the United States perhaps because it is not required. As the benefits of kindergarten screening continue to emerge, however, school systems may be more open to begin or enhance their kindergarten screening procedures. As a parent or caretaker, here’s what you should know.
On my annual family camping trip, I was out on the lake fishing with two of my brothers. We were making small talk as we were getting our lines ready to throw in the water.
“How’s work?”
“Good. Busy.”
“You? How’s work?”
“Same, busy.”
Then my brother asked a question that seemed almost comical, “Amanda, what do you do, anyway?” My other brother piped in curiously, “Yeah, what do you do??” The question came after I had been in my current position for a couple years, and I had been working as an I-O Psychology practitioner my whole career.
Every semester, psychology students around the country anxiously file into their required, introductory statistics classes. Although some love it, statistics tends to be difficult and anxiety-producing for psychology students (who sometimes refer to it as Sadistics 101). To combat this, publishers have released a flurry of student-friendly textbooks designed to make statistics more palatable. However, students often face challenges learning statistics, and, frankly, don’t generally like it.
Now in my 8th year as a psychology professor, one topic job that seems to consistently come up in conversation around working with students is email etiquette. I guess I should clarify that these conversations usually have to do with one part of email etiquette: expected response time. For better or worse (probably worse), it’s clear that in academia email has become the dominant way people communicate with each other.
As commencement approaches, our baccalaureate psychology graduates will likely hear the familiar admonition “But you can’t get a decent job with a bachelor’s degree in psychology!” There is some truth to that warning (Carnevale, et al., 2015; Rajecki & Borden, 2011) and to employers’ complaints that graduates are unprepared for work. However, if we vigorously shared other data with our students we could instill optimism in the 55% of those graduates who enter the job market.
How can teachers and advisors help?
Professional organizations are great resources for people already working in a field, but it turns out that they’re great for students, too! As I-O psychologists, our field bridges the gap between so many different specialty areas that it can be tough to find all the different organizations that can provide the best resources for us. The best place to start is the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), of course!
Kevin, a bright, enthusiastic second-grader, has tremendous difficulties in school. He can’t seem to pay attention to his teacher’s instruction, gets distracted easily by activities around him, has trouble staying still in his seat, and often bothers his classmates by talking to them during work time or calling out without permission. As a result, Kevin gets very little work done and is getting increasingly further behind in math and reading. Kevin’s teacher and parents are very frustrated and blame each other for Kevin’s difficulties. Unfortunately, Kevin’s situation is very typical for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); a condition that affects between 5 to 10% of students in the US.