“But if It’s in the Newspaper, Doesn’t That Mean It’s True?” Developing Critical Reading & Analysis Skills by Evaluating Newspaper Science with CREATE

摘要

The media will likely be a major source of science information after college for nonscience majors. It is thus essential that all students learn to critically read newspaper/ Internet science. I have adapted the CREATE approach, an active-learning method originally designed for close reading of journal articles (Hoskins et al., 2007), for use with a newspaper article written for the general public. The analysis challenges students to read closely, learn to represent data and design experiments, and think creatively about scientific issues and their social implications. The approaches outlined here can be adapted to any scientific reading and analysis.