Students Need to Be Able to Evaluate Media Claims. Here’s How We Help.

In today’s information-saturated world, our students are bombarded with claims about human behavior and mental processes—many of which are oversimplified, exaggerated, or simply incorrect.

As college instructors, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to equip our introductory psychology students with the tools to critically evaluate these claims. By better integrating research methods throughout our courses, I believe we can help students develop the critical thinking skills they need to navigate the complex landscape of psychological information.

Making Research Methods the Foundation

The APA-IPI places research methods as the foundation of our discipline and highlights scientific thinking as a key skill for students to develop.

In my own classes, I always wanted to help students go beyond just memorizing the definitions of terms like “independent variable” or “correlational coefficient.” Instead, I believe that students should be able to use these concepts as they develop the skills of interpreting real research and evaluating real claims in real headlines.

Confronting Challenges in Teaching Research Methods

However, during my time as a professor, I encountered several challenges when emphasizing research in introductory psychology:

Challenge 1. Student expectations: Many expect to learn about mental health and psychological disorders, not research and statistics. It’s important to find ways to expose students to the science that underpins the discipline.

Challenge 2. Need for repetition: Students require repeated exposure and practice, but most texts only cover research in the first or second chapter. As we know from Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, if we limit research to the first few days or weeks, students will forget most of it.

Challenge 3. Limited experience: Some of my students had never heard of a correlation before, and most used the term “experiment” in a general sense to refer to any type of study. This lack of foundational knowledge means that we often need to start with the basics due to students’ minimal exposure to research.

Providing Scaffolding to Help Students Use Research Methods and Evaluate Claims

To address these challenges, I developed a scaffolded approach to incorporate research methods throughout the course by having students evaluate news stories about recent psychological research.

I always found this to be a great way to engage students. Media claims are designed to grab our attention, and interrogating them is a terrific active learning opportunity. Students actually get to apply the concepts they’re learning about.

When I was developing my own psychology webtext, I baked these activities into every chapter. We call them Research Spotlights. They’re special pages that follow a three-step process to gradually build students’ scientific literacy skills.

You can take this process and try it out with your own students to evaluate any media claims about psychological research—including things students might see or hear on TikTok, Instagram, or their favorite podcast.

One of my favorite Research Spotlights is centered around a headline from Wired that students analyze in our chapter on the brain and nervous system. The headline suggests that driving a taxi changes people’s brains. But is it really true? The Research Spotlights show students how to answer that question themselves.

In every Research Spotlight, students

1. analyze the claim,
2. compare the research to the claim, and
3. evaluate the claim.

Step 1: Analyze the Claim

In this step, students read a real or a fictional headline and identify the type of claim being made and the variables involved in the claim.

The Research Spotlights help students do this through scaffolding and repetition:

Scaffolding: In Chapter 1 (Introduction to Psychology), students learn about three types of claims: frequency, association, and cause-and-effect. They learn how to identify variables and how each type of claim describes the variables or relationships between the variables.

Repetition: In every subsequent Research Spotlight, students analyze a headline to determine the variables, the words or phrases that describe the variable or relationships between variables, and the type of claim the headline is making.

Step 2: Compare the Research to the Claim

In this step, students apply what they have learned about research to think critically about the claim and the evidence needed to support that claim. It requires understanding research basics, recognizing key research elements when reading an excerpt or summary of a research study, and enough data literacy to accurately interpret the results of a study.

Here are examples of how we use scaffolding and repetition to help students with this step:

Scaffolding: In Chapter 2 (The Brain and the Nervous System), students read a summary of the research findings the Wired article cites. As they work through the webtext, they develop the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret charts, graphs, correlation matrices, and basic descriptive and inferential statistics. By the time they reach Chapter 12 (Motivation), they can approach the chart to the right with the knowledge and confidence to accurately interpret it.

Repetition: We introduce basic research definitions in Chapter 1 and repeatedly reinforce them in the first half of the webtext as students develop the skills to identify them.

Step 3: Evaluate the Claim

In this final step, students determine whether or not the research supports the claim in the headline. We want them to be able to identify claims that are supported by the evidence as well as claims that aren’t, so the Research Spotlights provide a mix of both.

In order to evaluate whether the claim made in a headline is accurate, students need to determine not only if the results support the claim but if the research method used can support that type of claim.

To establish cause-and-effect claims, I chose to focus on three criteria. In my experience, students need to understand more than “correlation does not equal causation.” They need to understand that cause-and-effect claims must meet three criteria:

1. Covariance (The variables must change or behave together.)
2. Temporal precedence (The “cause” must come before the “effect.”)
3. Internal validity (There must be sufficient control over extraneous variables.)

Since these can be difficult concepts, Research Spotlights again provide repetition and scaffolding:

Scaffolding: In Chapter 1, students are introduced to the three criteria. In the first five or so Research Spotlights, they practice explaining why the study did or did not meet each criterion with some of the information provided in a table. Then, in subsequent Research Spotlights, the scaffolding is removed and students identify how the study did not meet each criterion.

Repetition: In every Research Spotlight, students determine whether or not the claim in the headline is accurate based on the methods and results of the study.

In the case of the Wired headline in Chapter 2’s Research Spotlight—“How Driving a Taxi Changes London Cabbies’ Brains”—the research does support the claim. But this isn’t always the case. We’ve included a variety of headline claims in the webtext. Some are supported by the research; some aren’t.

Fostering Critical Thinking

By structuring and incorporating research methods and scientific literacy in this way, we’re not just teaching psychology—we’re fostering critical thinking skills that will serve our students well beyond their time in our classrooms.

Remember, most of our introductory psychology students won’t become psychology majors. But they will need to navigate a world full of claims and counterclaims. By emphasizing research methods and scientific thinking, we’re equipping them with the tools they need to be informed, critical consumers of information.

If you’d like to explore a Research Spotlight page yourself and learn more about my webtext, Psychology in the Real World, visit the catalog page and click “Get started.”