The Role of Instruction in Shaping Reasoning about Bodies of Evidence: An Experimental Comparison

Abstract

The public often falls prey to skewed narratives on social media, such as when these narratives are built on cherry-picked evidence, overlooking larger bodies of evidence. We compared three instructional conditions (control with complementary information only, invention task and cued questions, and invention task and text-based instruction in evidence evaluation) to develop Japanese undergraduate students’ epistemic reasoning to discern and lean towards claims backed by a larger body of research as well as detailed descriptions of its evidence sources. Results showed that students with an invention task and text-based instruction more critically evaluated the strength of evidence and trustworthiness who presented cherry-picked evidence than those in the other conditions, which indicates the effect of instruction.