Educational Responses to "Post-Truth" Challenge

Educational Responses to "Post-Truth" Challenges
 

Dr. Sarit Barzilai 
Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences
 Faculty of Education, The University of Haifa

Date:    November 29, 2022 (Tuesday)   
Time:    16:30 – 18:00 (HKT)      
Chair:    Dr. Jessica Leung
 

The seminar will be conducted via ZOOM
 

Online Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=85049  

(Please register by November 27, 2022 (Sunday). The meeting ID and password will be sent to registrants by email.)
 

Abstract:
Widespread misinformation, disinformation, and science denial pose a growing threat to citizens' capabilities to make informed personal, societal, and environmental decisions. In this talk, I will argue that education has a critical role to play in developing students' capabilities and dispositions to reason well in a "post-truth" world. I will start by describing four "post-truth" thinking problems: (1) not knowing how to deal critically with online information, (2) fallible ways of knowing that are amplified by current (mis)information environments, (3) not caring enough about truth and accuracy, and (4) deep epistemic disagreements about how to know. Second, I will propose that addressing these challenges requires rethinking the goals of students' epistemic growth. I will discuss a novel theoretical framework, the Apt-AIR framework, which proposes that education should foster students' apt epistemic performance. Third, I will describe several instructional directions for promoting apt epistemic performance in a "post-truth" world and illustrate them through recent studies conducted in my research group. 
    
About the speaker:
Dr. Sarit Barzilai is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences in the Faculty of Education of the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses on epistemic thinking, metacognition, multiple document literacy, inquiry learning, and game-based learning. Her principal interest is investigating how to promote learners' epistemic growth so that they are better able to cope with the challenges of twenty-first century knowledge societies. Dr. Barzilai designs and investigates technology-enhanced learning environments for promoting learners' epistemic growth. Her recent research focuses on how to address the current "post-truth" climate, and she has co-edited a special issue of Educational Psychologist on educational responses to "post-truth" problems. Dr. Barzilai is a recipient of the International Society of the Learning Sciences Early Career Award, the Journal of the Learning Sciences Best Paper Award, and the EARLI Outstanding Publication Award. Her full profile can be found here: https://sarit-barzilai.edu.haifa.ac.il
 

For enquiries, please contact the Office of Research, Faculty of Education at  hkchow@hku.hk