As an outsider (British) I've heard about some local education authorities in the US attempting to mandate the teaching of pseudo-science (most commonly creationism but also a myriad of other pseudo-sciences) or attempting to ignore or even discredit established science.
Have you had any experience with this? How big of a problem do you think it is?
Also do you know whether there is any effort in your schools to teach things like the scientific method, statistical methods, how to read a basic scientific paper etc so that students know how scientific knowledge is obtained?
This is an area of science education that is severely lacking in almost every jurisdiction I have come across to the point where some "science editors" at large publications seem to have no idea how to read and understand an academic paper (if they even bother to attempt to read it, many just rewrite another article or worse, a blog post, without any attempt to verify it). It has gotten to the point that the majority of popular news articles on new science misrepresent (to the point of plain falsehood in many cases) the paper it is based on.
Sorry if you have no idea about any of this. I don't really know how the American state education system works so I don't know if you are involved with this kind of thing.
beverly_marsh8 karma
As an outsider (British) I've heard about some local education authorities in the US attempting to mandate the teaching of pseudo-science (most commonly creationism but also a myriad of other pseudo-sciences) or attempting to ignore or even discredit established science.
Have you had any experience with this? How big of a problem do you think it is?
Also do you know whether there is any effort in your schools to teach things like the scientific method, statistical methods, how to read a basic scientific paper etc so that students know how scientific knowledge is obtained?
This is an area of science education that is severely lacking in almost every jurisdiction I have come across to the point where some "science editors" at large publications seem to have no idea how to read and understand an academic paper (if they even bother to attempt to read it, many just rewrite another article or worse, a blog post, without any attempt to verify it). It has gotten to the point that the majority of popular news articles on new science misrepresent (to the point of plain falsehood in many cases) the paper it is based on.
Sorry if you have no idea about any of this. I don't really know how the American state education system works so I don't know if you are involved with this kind of thing.
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