John Kirkman University of Birmingham

1. Decisions about likelihood of veracity of news reports of science: The contribution of advanced knowledge of science. John Kirkman University of Birmingham

2. Certainty of scientific claims • Tentativeness of scientific knowledge part of Nature of Science (e.g. Lederman, 1999) • Internal uncertainty (personally unsure/ignorant); External uncertainty (‘nobody knows’) (Kahneman and Tversky) • Uncertainty is a social construct and negotiated (Einsiedel and Thorne, 1999) Clarity of meaning of terms? Likelihood of veracity

3. News reports of science • Decision making in Socio-scientific issues (SSI) relies on access to reliable scientific information (Roberts, 2007) • Engagement with science in the news other than associated with SSI • A tame version of “Scientific literacy in the wild” (van Eijck and Roth, 2010)?

4. Previous research findings on responding to certainty of news reports of science. • High school students tend to overestimate the certainty of knowledge claims (Norris & Philips, 1994) • People use a wide range of criteria other than scientific content knowledge in their evaluations (Kolstø et al. 1996) • Pupils, students and graduates showed signs of evaluating evidence in New Scientist articles (Ratcliffe, 1999) • Requests for information required to establish if reported conclusions were true where most frequently about how research done and why research occurred (Korpan et al.,1999)

5. Theoretical constructs Epistemic distance (Norris 1997, p. 253) • Indicating the willingness to accept a knowledge claim and so highlighting that knowledge claims are not necessarily certain knowledge. • An epistemic distance of zero means that the claim is accepted (high likelihood of veracity). • An epistemic distance of one means that the claim is entirely rejected (zero/low likelihood of veracity). • There is a continuum between the two extremes. Not just about deciding if individual claims are to be believed or not but also a “wide variety of beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions toward science” (p. 253)

6. Purposes • To describe trainee teachers responses to news reports to ultimately inform content of pre-service science teacher curriculum. • To explore how expert readers engage with news reports of science and to identify any role of scientific knowledge. Research Question • What difference does advanced training in science (first degree plus subject training during teacher education) make to how people decide about likelihood of veracity of knowledge claims in news reports of science?

7. Methods • Post graduate pre-service science teachers (14) and history teachers (12) yon a one year programme • Convenience sample • Four news articles from BBC Website • Brief questionnaire • Individual semi-structured interviews • Questions asked about what they thought about the certainty of the headline claims, usefulness of information on methods and any data/evidence • Interviews audio recorded and transcribed

9. Analysis : Identifying lines of reasoning “They look like they've done reasonably. I can't remember what the word is for a fair test. But they look like they've um got a control group of the people who didn't take any drugs as well as a number of groups for um the different types of use um including former use. So it looks like it is a reasonably well controlled trial.” (1C) If (cue) then (conclusion about likelihood of veracity) Example: If (reasonably well controlled trial) then (reduce epistemic distance)

10. Couplings between condition and conclusion

11. Couplings between condition and conclusion

12. Science trainees History trainees More occurrences of examining: • Relationships between variables • Control groups • Causal factors • Sample size • Issues of writing/reporting More positive about scientific methods adopted in reported studies More examples of pointing out presence of results or evidence Limitations of frequency counts – not seeking to generalise but offer descriptions.

13. Individual response (science trainee – article about cockroaches) Cues represented by triangles (direction show changes to epistemic distance) • Balanced some increasing and some decreasing epistemic distance. • Role of existing knowledge including from personal experience

14. Science respondent 2 – brushing teeth article “it’s a big step [from] headline [to] what they actually found out” “they have only got an observation, they haven’t really got any sort of an explanation” “[researchers] are not sure either really but it’s the sort of best explanation they’ve got at the moment” 2A

15. Conclusions • Some lines of reasoning identified which include a cue and conclusion about likelihood of veracity. • Different articles raise different sorts of issues. • Scientific explanations are of interest to those trained in science but there was no evidence of this interest in history trainees.

16. Implications/ Future work • When are particular lines of reasoning appropriate to use and when not? • Data collected for a further series of case studies to explore the lines of reasoning with the following changes: • participants choice of what to read according to interest • reading undertaken before the interview • participants able to read around the article and follow hyperlinks • “locate” issues of certainty/likelihood of veracity and to try and identify when, during reading of articles, it is useful to examine likelihood of veracity.

17. Other thoughts • Fairclough (1995) “order of discourse” • “a structure set of conventions associated with semiotic activities (including use of language) in a given social space” (p. 20 in Airey and Linder, 2009) • ‘disciplinary discourse’ (Airey and Linder, 2009) – more focussed than Gee’s Discourse - a complex of the tools, representations and activities of a discipline.

18. Selecting the articles • Selection criteria for media report used in this study • Read for meaning in a few minutes • In wide circulation • In the popular press (not specialist publications such as New Scientist) • Contains some reference to the research methods used • Contains some data from the original research study • Based on a single research study with identifiable author(s) and/or source.