Fact-checking "100 Things You Never Knew About Your Genes"

If my goals are

• to produce a curated bibliography for 39 of the DNA facts
• to help demonstrate how to be information literate

then I owe it to readers to be transparent about the process. I think this is an important way to model information literacy: explain the process of fact-checking, particularly how decisions are made about how the copious information reviewed ultimately gets whittled down and passed on to the audience in digestible pieces.

Remember, this process is arguably the reason that scientific research conclusions get blown out of proportion or misconstrued, because the goals of media are to outcompete other outlets for audience and to give the audience information in a format that the audience wants. And, more and more, that means quick bites of information that necessarily exclude important details for understanding the assumptions, meaning, value and/or impact of a research study.

For example, if you only read the title of Beall and Tracy's 2013 paper in Psychological Science, "Women are more likely to wear red or pink at peak fertility," you might take this claim at face value. However, this study fails critical thinking and good information literacy practices in many ways, including that the title does not specify which women. You have to delve into the research paper itself to learn how many women were surveyed, and where in the world they live. This is where critical thinking is important. When I see the title of this study, I start thinking questions like, "What do they mean by 'more likely' - how much more likely than women wearing other colors?" "Where in the world did these women come from - might there be a cultural bias in what colors are worn?" "When was the study conducted: was it around Christmastime, where it might be more likely that women are wearing red?" "What control experiment was conducted - what about men, for example? Or women of ages outside of the fertility range?" And, because I'm red-green color-blind, another really important question to ask: "Who decided what shades and hues count as red or pink? Did women self-report, or did the research take photographs of the clothing and objectively define and measure both red and pink?"

So, this is how the fact-checking will work in my class:

When we begin to study a topic that is relevant to a group of DNA facts, then I'll present that group to the students and ask each student to select one to scrutinize. As we study that topic, the students will be introduced to concepts and vocabulary that might be important for them to understand the research literature they'll access for fact-checking their chosen claim. By the end of the topic, each student finds one primary peer-reviewed research manuscript that contains evidence either supporting or refuting the fact. Using that single-source information, each student writes and sends me a short (~1-2 paragraph) summary of the information, along with the citation to the primary literature.

Then, on my end, I compile and read through the student summaries as well as many of the commonly-cited research studies. I look for common misconceptions in how some of my students might have misinterpreted data from the studies, and I identify whether multiple sources tend to agree or not on the fact. So that I can give my students feedback on their work (which they will hopefully use to improve their information literacy and critical thinking skills), I give a short in-class presentation the day after their summaries are due, which includes:

• summarizing various student perspectives about whether fact is supported or not
• addressing misconceptions related to genetics concepts that were evident in the written summaries
• highlighting strengths and weaknesses related to the credibility of sources that were used

Finally, after discussion, I put the matter to a yes or no vote:

"Based on the information found in published research literature, is it reasonable for this claimed fact to be called a fact?"