RT Journal Article
T1 “Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19
A1 Puig Mauriz, Blanca
A1 Blanco Anaya, Paloma
A1 Pérez Maceira, Jorge José
K1 Critical thinking
K1 Argumentation
K1 Socio-scientific issues
K1 COVID-19 disease
K1 Fake news
K1 Epistemic assessment
K1 Secondary education
AB Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students (N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlines
PB Frontiers
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/26389
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/26389
LA eng
NO Puig B, Blanco-Anaya P and Pérez-Maceira JJ (2021) “Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19. Front. Educ. 6:646909. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.646909
NO This work was supported by the project ESPIGA, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities, partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Grant code: PGC2018-096581-B-C22
DS Minerva
RD 28 abr 2026