I can't put this post off any longer, because I am friends with many former students on facebook who continually share memes and articles that make me feel like a complete failure as a teacher (I figured I'd start on a positive note in this post).
Let me start by saying that I love Facebook - it's an amazing way to share knowledge. But unfortunately, it's also an amazing way to share superstition, logical fallacies, incorrect information, and straight up lies. And as a social studies and English teacher, I am responsible for making students literate enough to recognize bias and subjectivity in a source. I have never done a perfect job at this. It is a constant work in progress. Here are some of the struggles I've noticed that social studies teachers face when attempting to teach students how to recognize bias in a source:
Luckily, the Global History and Geography Regents has slashed the amount of content that students need to know for the test, so we don't need to teach about as many historical figures and events. But it is still a struggle for students who need more time to read and comprehend the text in the first place to then have them recognize bias by comparing several texts to see which one is the closest to objective truth. Can we do better? I think we can. Here's something I've been toying with for years, but I think I've gotten it down to as short as possible. The front of the handout has students do a brief analysis of a source using mostly YES or NO questions. The answers they write correlate to points (14 possible total), and the more points a source earns, the more trustworthy it is (unbiased, reliant on verifiable evidence, written by someone with expertise). Then the back of the handout helps students figure out how they can use it to prove their point. The back might be unnecessary for students who are adept at using evidence to prove claims.
https://sharemylesson.com/teaching-resource/crap-test-reliablecredible-sources-274201
Science teachers can also support and augment students' truth-finding skills.
In science, we come a lot closer to objective truth. I know that scientists are always hesitant to claim that their theory is a fact, but let's be honest - most science that students learn is verified by an enormous body of research spanning decades. Science is full of knowledge that can be shown to be true, and yet, I have a lot of former students who don't understand how scientific truth works or why a research study is more valid than their own personal experiences. Science classes can be tweaked so that they all reinforce the scientific method during every unit. Imagine if students left high school with the understanding that to prove any claim, you need it to be:
So science and social studies teachers are both looking at the same struggles: How to teach truth-finding literacy in our fields without sacrificing so much time that we don't cover the required content. But the consequences of not doing this are huge: students might actually start to believe some of these ideas:
And these are wildly unprovable and fallacious claims, but I see dozens of students posting memes and trusting them. Trusting memes! Without a source! Without NUMBERS OR MEASUREMENTS!
This other blog post is something I'd be interested to hear science teachers' feedback on, because it gets to the heart of what I'm trying to say, but in much more sciencey language and with very detailed examples. http://www.thinkbeyond.us/notscience.html
I think if all science and social studies units could be grounded in "What is the truth and what process should we use to find it?", we can help our students see the ways in which real professionals find truth, so they don't use personal experience or random opinions as a marker for what is real and not real. What do we all think of this?
Let me start by saying that I love Facebook - it's an amazing way to share knowledge. But unfortunately, it's also an amazing way to share superstition, logical fallacies, incorrect information, and straight up lies. And as a social studies and English teacher, I am responsible for making students literate enough to recognize bias and subjectivity in a source. I have never done a perfect job at this. It is a constant work in progress. Here are some of the struggles I've noticed that social studies teachers face when attempting to teach students how to recognize bias in a source:
- First, students need to read a source. Many sources for history classes are hard to understand for struggling readers. These can be because they were written by historians or journalists writing for adult audiences, or because the sources are primary, written in archaic rhetoric and dialects, sometimes originally in foreign languages, so their translations have awkward syntax and diction. We will often spend a day just getting our students to read the words of a text, like an excerpt from a speech, religious text, or code of laws. Some of our students are fast workers and can read a text quickly, but for others, they spend 20-60 seconds here or there having side conversations or just thinking about something. Some students are so disengaged that they scan the text without reading it, but look like they are working, and then our CFU (check for understanding) questions reveal that they didn't read it.
- Then, we need to give them time to analyze the document to make sure they can use the information in some higher-order thinking framework (moving up Bloom's taxonomy) and understand the impacts of it in history. Between #1 and #2, this can take a day.
- During the analysis part, it is possible to have students identify bias in the writing. Except often, to identify bias, you need to have an objective set of facts as an anchor. For example.
- I need students to understand that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk modernized Turkey and brought more secular ideas into the culture. So I find a document explaining this, and it's a secondary source. But how do we know that the historian who wrote this isn't being biased? We would need a DIFFERENT source to compare it to. So now, we need to repeat steps 1 and 2 for a new document.
- But that's only 2 sources. If I told you I only read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for my news, you would be right to think that I could be missing some facts or other, valid perspectives. So to identify bias and sift through it to be completely media literate, students should really be comparing multiple documents.
- And if we repeat this for every person, event, or place in our curriculum, you can see why identifying bias often falls to the bottom of our priorities when content knowledge and writing skills are more immediate needs for our students. We often don't ask students to examine bias in our units except where bias is the point (Columbus' perception of Native Americans, Europeans' perception of Africans, Israelis' and Palestinians' perception of each other, the U.S. and Soviet perceptions of each other, etc)
Luckily, the Global History and Geography Regents has slashed the amount of content that students need to know for the test, so we don't need to teach about as many historical figures and events. But it is still a struggle for students who need more time to read and comprehend the text in the first place to then have them recognize bias by comparing several texts to see which one is the closest to objective truth. Can we do better? I think we can. Here's something I've been toying with for years, but I think I've gotten it down to as short as possible. The front of the handout has students do a brief analysis of a source using mostly YES or NO questions. The answers they write correlate to points (14 possible total), and the more points a source earns, the more trustworthy it is (unbiased, reliant on verifiable evidence, written by someone with expertise). Then the back of the handout helps students figure out how they can use it to prove their point. The back might be unnecessary for students who are adept at using evidence to prove claims.
https://sharemylesson.com/teaching-resource/crap-test-reliablecredible-sources-274201
Science teachers can also support and augment students' truth-finding skills.
In science, we come a lot closer to objective truth. I know that scientists are always hesitant to claim that their theory is a fact, but let's be honest - most science that students learn is verified by an enormous body of research spanning decades. Science is full of knowledge that can be shown to be true, and yet, I have a lot of former students who don't understand how scientific truth works or why a research study is more valid than their own personal experiences. Science classes can be tweaked so that they all reinforce the scientific method during every unit. Imagine if students left high school with the understanding that to prove any claim, you need it to be:
- Precisely defined
- Testable
- Either verifiable or falsifiable
- Measuring it
- Showing a pattern
- Replicating the pattern despite different variables
- Making sure that the testers didn't impact or couldn't have impacted the results.
- There is so much data that students need to accept before they can understand the applications of that data, and how scientific fact is applied is a big focus of the Regents exams and other standardized tests.
- Looking at how the data was tested in the first place to establish its validity would require a lot of reading about historical experiments and the original scientists who proved theories, which brings us into the literacy issues and time constraints of the classroom.
- Ruling out variables means that students are going to have to be asking a lot of "what if" questions and then proving them wrong, which takes a lot of time away from content exploration, and science teachers could run out of time and not teach enough content.
So science and social studies teachers are both looking at the same struggles: How to teach truth-finding literacy in our fields without sacrificing so much time that we don't cover the required content. But the consequences of not doing this are huge: students might actually start to believe some of these ideas:
- 9/11 was an inside job
- Vaccines cause autism
- The government is perpetuating a genocide of black people
- Prescription drugs are bad for you
- Voting doesn't matter because both major parties are the same
- Birth control and condoms are harmful to human health
- Your social security number is actually a government bank account that is used to make money off of you
And these are wildly unprovable and fallacious claims, but I see dozens of students posting memes and trusting them. Trusting memes! Without a source! Without NUMBERS OR MEASUREMENTS!
This other blog post is something I'd be interested to hear science teachers' feedback on, because it gets to the heart of what I'm trying to say, but in much more sciencey language and with very detailed examples. http://www.thinkbeyond.us/notscience.html
I think if all science and social studies units could be grounded in "What is the truth and what process should we use to find it?", we can help our students see the ways in which real professionals find truth, so they don't use personal experience or random opinions as a marker for what is real and not real. What do we all think of this?