Investigating Critical Thinking, Pseudoscientific Beliefs, and Scientific Literacy in Elementary School Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The importance of critical thinking and the ability to differentiate falsehood from fact is difficult to discount. By having these skills, individuals are less susceptible to circumstances like malicious interests, scams, and exaggerated claims. Previous research studying pseudoscientific beliefs and scientific literacy in adults indicates that despite receiving an education in science and the social sciences in elementary, junior high, and high school, pseudoscientific thinking persists and is common amongst post-secondary students. Furthermore, research shows that participation in an intervention where pseudoscientific principles are presented and debunked is effective in reducing pseudoscientific thinking. This study aims to understand the current level of scientific competency in elementary school children and create an intervention to increase scientific literacy and skepticism within that grade group. One of the goals of this research is to create an educator resource so that pseudoscientific principles can be better incorporated into elementary science education. Faculty Mentor: Rodney Schmaltz Department: Psychology (Honours)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".