Identification of false news about science and technology by pre-service elementary science teachers

Abstract

The growing occurrence of false news on the Internet is one of the international issues, because the sensationalism, misrepresentation, no evidences, untrue or disinformation of many news, requires special training in the identification of such fallacies. The pre-service teachers training is one of the strategies to prevent and prepare the public towards greater commitment and critical thinking. In this paper an activity of false news identification is presented by pre-service elementary science teachers (hereinafter EGP), which also analyzes the epistemological beliefs that they have about science and technology, and whether these can help or not to the success identifying false news of the students. It is observed with a sample of 38 EGP that students with an evaluatism thought could identify the different types of false news equally, while those with an absolutist or multiplicist thought had more difficulties to identify the misrepresentation and / or lack of information on the news. Likewise, a methodology is presented with the tool hypothes.is that allows online the citation and creation of annotations in web pages about false publications.