Preparing students to engage with science‐ and technology‐related misinformation: The role of epistemic insight

Helping students to become more resilient to online misinformation is widely recognised as an essential task for education in a rapidly digitalising world. Students need both scientific knowledge and epistemic insight to navigate online spaces containing sensationalised reports of scientific and technological developments. Epistemic insight involves epistemic curiosity and the ability to think critically about the nature, application and communication of knowledge. This includes developing an understanding of the power and limitations of science and a curiosity regarding its relationship with other disciplines. We present a workshop designed for school students aged 16–18 titled ‘Can science and technology cure loneliness?’, designed to develop students' epistemic insight through investigating loneliness through a multidisciplinary perspective. We discuss how the design and pedagogy of this workshop might help students to build epistemic humility—the recognition that no single disciplinary perspective can complete our knowledge about a given topic. As part of a broader programme, epistemic insight-based pedagogies have the potential to develop students' resistance to science- and technology-related misinformation and prepare them for their potential role in shaping our scientific and technological future

Covid-19 as an opportunity to teach epistemic insight: findings from exploratory workshops on Covid-19 and science with students aged 15–17 in England

The contributions of science and scientists to combatting Covid-19 have been at the forefront of media attention throughout 2020 and early 2021, exposing the public to the processes of science in an unprecedented manner. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of scientists working collaboratively with other disciplines in informing thinking about a complex, evolving real-world problem. This draws attention to recent efforts, both in the UK and internationally, towards curriculum reform integrating epistemic insight (knowledge about knowledge, including about what disciplines are and how they interact), with significant implications for the teaching of science in schools. We present findings from two exploratory workshops with 15–17-year-old students in England on the role of science during the pandemic. We found that the workshops provided space for students to begin to develop epistemic insight regarding how science informs decision-making in dialogue with other disciplines. We make recommendations proposing pedagogical approaches using live, complex, real-world problems to address issues around understandings of the nature of science, misinformation, trust and participation in science

Air quality and error quantity: pollution and performance in a high-skilled, quality-focused occupation

We provide the first evidence that short-term exposure to air pollution affects the work performance of a group of highly-skilled, quality-focused employees. We repeatedly observe the decision-making of individual professional baseball umpires, quasi-randomly assigned to varying air quality across time and space. Unique characteristics of this setting combined with high-frequency data disentangle effects of multiple pollutants and identify previously under-explored acute effects. We find a 1 ppm increase in 3-hour CO causes an 11.5% increase in the propensity of umpires to make incorrect calls and a 10 mg/m3 increase in 12-hour PM2.5 causes a 2.6% increase. We control carefully for a variety of potential confounders and results are supported by robustness and falsification checks

Sexuality education as political theology: pathways to non-violence

Thinking sexuality education and religion together often results in antagonisms that pit religious and secular values against each other. Political theology provides new insights into this tendency by showing how modern concepts of political legitimacy are based on secularised Christian theology. Neoliberal schooling, public sexual health and human rights provide legitimacy for sexuality education in post-Christian societies and all three are grounded in political theology. The political theology of sexuality education can be seen wherever ideal sexual subjectivities are presented which set up standards which one can succeed or fail to meet with clear consequences. These standards could be heterosexual, safe and marital, but equally agential, pleasurable, transgressive and self-aware. While there may be many ways of escaping the Christian political theological foundations of sexuality education altogether, a political theology of non-violence opens up a way for Christian and secular conceptions of sexuality education to move forward amidst significant cultural and moral difference

Infants understand deceptive intentions to implant false beliefs about identity: New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning

Are infants capable of representing false beliefs, as the mentalistic account of early psychological reasoning suggests, or are they incapable of doing so, as the minimalist account suggests? The present research sought to shed light on this debate by testing the minimalist claim that a signature limit of early psychological reasoning is a specific inability to understand false beliefs about identity: because of their limited representational capabilities, infants should be unable to make sense of situations where an agent mistakes one object for another, visually identical object. To evaluate this claim, three experiments examined whether 17-month-olds could reason about the actions of a deceptive agent who sought to implant in another agent a false belief about the identity of an object. In each experiment, a thief attempted to secretly steal a desirable rattling toy during its owner’s absence by substituting a less desirable silent toy. Infants realized that this substitution could be effective only if the silent toy was visually identical to the rattling toy (Experiment 1) and the owner did not routinely shake her toy when she returned (Experiment 2). When these conditions were met, infants expected the owner to be deceived and to mistake the silent toy for the rattling toy she had left behind (Experiment 3). Together, these results cast doubt on the minimalist claim that infants cannot represent false beliefs about identity. More generally, these results indicate that infants in the 2nd year of life can reason not only about the actions of agents who hold false beliefs, but also about the actions of agents who seek to implant false beliefs, thus providing new support for the mentalistic claim that an abstract capacity to reason about false beliefs emerges early in human development

Impacts and mitigation of excess diesel-related NOx emissions in 11 major vehicle markets

Vehicle emissions contribute to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) and tropospheric ozone air pollution, affecting human health, crop yields and climate worldwide. On-road diesel vehicles produce approximately 20 per cent of global anthropogenic emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO x), which are key PM 2.5 and ozone precursors. Regulated NO x emission limits in leading markets have been progressively tightened, but current diesel vehicles emit far more NO x under real-world operating conditions than during laboratory certification testing. Here we show that across 11 markets, representing approximately 80 per cent of global diesel vehicle sales, nearly one-third of on-road heavy-duty diesel vehicle emissions and over half of on-road light-duty diesel vehicle emissions are in excess of certification limits. These excess emissions (totalling 4.6 million tons) are associated with about 38,000 PM 2.5 - and ozone-related premature deaths globally in 2015, including about 10 per cent of all ozone-related premature deaths in the 28 European Union member states. Heavy-duty vehicles are the dominant contributor to excess diesel NO x emissions and associated health impacts in almost all regions. Adopting and enforcing next-generation standards (more stringent than Euro 6/VI) could nearly eliminate real-world diesel-related NO x emissions in these markets, avoiding approximately 174,000 global PM 2.5 - and ozone-related premature deaths in 2040. Most of these benefits can be achieved by implementing Euro VI standards where they have not yet been adopted for heavy-duty vehicles