The goal of science education is to prepare students to make decisions about the complicated socioscientific issues that are an inescapable part of modern life, from personal medical decisions to evaluating a political candidate's environmental platform. We cannot expect adults to maintain a deep conceptual understanding of the current state of every branch of science that might prove relevant to their lives, so we must prepare them to rely on other knowledge to make these decisions. Epistemological beliefs about scientific knowledge - what it is, its purpose, how it is constructed - are one type of knowledge that could be brought to bear when evaluating scientific claims. Complicating this situation is the fact that most adults will get most of their information about these socioscientific issues from the news media. Journalists do not have the same goals or norms as scientists, and this media lens can distort scientific issues. This dissertation addresses the question of whether we can assess epistemological change in a way that gives us meaningful information about how people will apply their epistemological understanding of science when they make decisions in the real world. First, I designed a written assessment made up of performance tasks to assess middle school students' implicit epistemological beliefs, and looked at whether we can use such an assessment to see epistemological change over two years. I then gave the same students news articles about whether there is a link between vaccines and autism and looked at their reasoning about this issue and how the journalistic features of two different articles impacted their reasoning. Finally, I examined the external validity of the epistemology assessment by looking at whether it predicted anything about students' responses to the news articles. While I was able to find evidence of differences between eighth graders' and sixth graders' use of epistemological resources within the performance tasks, I found that their reasoning about the socioscientific issue was heavily dependent on the choices made by the journalists who wrote the news articles. The epistemological assessment gave us some information about their reasoning about the news articles, but this, too, was very highly dependent on the article itself. If our goal is to facilitate reasoning about socioscientific issues in the real world, we need to keep in mind the impact of the media on that process. These findings have implications both for how we teach science toward that goal and how we assess our progress

Last modified

• 01/09/2019

Creator

• Brandy Liane Evans Buckingham

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2745Z

Subject

• Learning Sciences

Keyword

• media literacy
• epistemology
• science journalism
• science education
• assessment

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright