Teaching Research Practices with Scientific Research Misrepresented in the Media

Teaching students scientific literacy is a core requirement at most liberal arts schools. These requirements can be met with subject-specific science classes. However, this approach may be challenging for non-science students, and often fails to cover the concept of scientific misinformation in news media. In the modern era, scientific misinformation can be a significant problem for the general public. This problem is caused in part by irresponsible reporting in the news, and lack of scientific literacy in the intended audience. The general population tends to take media reports at face value, and does not research the scientific sources of news media reports. At Lynn University, we teach core science in our Dialogues of Scientific Literacy series. We make this content interactive so that students can improve their research skills by learning how to find relevant details in scientific sources, identifying when they are being explained accurately. This occurs through a series of scaffolded assignments, each focusing on a different aspect of a research article and how it is represented in the news. This has proven to be a useful tool for teaching an element of scientific literacy and research that is becoming more and more important every day: identifying misinformation. Here, I detail one example of a series of assignments and how this approach has worked to improve scientific literacy among non-science majors at a small liberal arts university.