As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800 that officially offered 4 colors — black, red, blue, and white. My brother and I…
Fake news is not a problem caused by those dishonorable people whose political values differ from yours. Misinformation researchers have proposed two competing hypotheses for why people fall for fake news on social media. The popular assumption—supported by research on apathy over climate change and the denial of its existence—is that people are blinded by partisanship, and will leverage their critical-thinking skills to ram the square pegs of misinformation into the…
For the UK Guardian, the news is the words the White House used while accusing Acosta of an action caught on video. For Fox, Sanders was accused of sharing an allegedly “‘doctored’” video of a neutrally-identified “interaction.” For the Washington Post, the White House “shares doctored video” — no accusation, no scare quotes. Read these articles for yourself, not just the headlines. We learn by seeking evidence from multiple…
Critical Thinking Matters Personal Essays vs. Academic Writing Summary vs. Original Ideas Filler: “There Are Many Reasons to Avoid the Filler Phrase ‘There Are’” Bloom’s Taxonomy: Hierarchy of Critical Thinking Skills
All human endeavors are biased. Vanessa Otero’s chart, which places various news organizations on a 2D chart with a left/centrist/right X axis, and a quality/garbage vertical axis, is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that seeking out and relying on quality reporting from “the other side” is an important part of understanding the complexity of issues the world is facing. If you really can’t find any credible news source that…
I got a perfect score. How did you do on this Pew Research quiz? See below how your results for the factual and opinion statements compared with the 5,035 randomly sampled adults that took part in our national survey and review how you responded to each question. For more information, see the full report, “Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News.” For more details on how we defined factual and…