For at least half a century, there has been a broad consensus that indoctrination is a pernicious form of miseducation and a distinctive vice of teaching. In recent years, a number of educational theorists have sought to cast doubt on this view. They suggest that the attention traditionally given to the threat of indoctrination, and the anxiety…

Purpose: Although social media platforms have made information about autism more accessible to the general public, concerns have been raised about the unfiltered nature of the content they host. In the current study, we examined the reach and accuracy of videos providing informational content about autism on TikTok, a popular social media…

Completely switching from cigarette smoking to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) reduces exposure to toxic substances. Yet, many smokers believe that ENDS are at least as harmful as smoking, making them less likely to switch from cigarettes to ENDS. Effectively communicating reduced-exposure information is critical, but such messages…

Here we report a successful initiative between Brazil and Germany to stimulate neuroscience outreach: the POPNeuro Program. The POPNeuro Program is a neuroscience outreach project created in Brazil that has been active for >10 years. It was initiated in Uruguaiana, RS, Brazil and linked to the Physiology Research Group from the Federal…

The term "neuromyth" is becoming part of discourse in the field of mind, brain, and education. In this article, I review some problematic aspects of the practice, critique specific examples, and propose an alternative way of communicating with the public about findings in psychology and neuroscience.

We discuss a case study on how misinformation regarding COVID-19 health outcomes can arise due to confounding. Data from the UK on mortality rates suggest that people who have some level of vaccination and contract the Delta variant of COVID are twice as likely to die than those who are unvaccinated. Age, however, a confounding variable, when…

Misinformation has been extensively studied as both maliciously intended propaganda and accidentally experienced incorrect assumptions. We contend that "conceptual contamination" is the process by which the learning of incorrect information interferes, pollutes, or otherwise disrupts the learning of correct information. This is similar…

Writing in 2011, Philip Kitcher worried in 'Public knowledge and its enemies' that flaws in the dissemination of public knowledge would lead from a state of widespread ignorance to active resistance against expertise and more. Today, we seem to be living in the world Kitcher predicted, where a wide range of facts ranging from the results of…

The Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) is a provider of two major services to the environmental science community; JASMIN and the CEDA Archive. CEDA is frequently required to evidence the impact it has on researchers and wider society. However, this is challenging as there are currently no formal or standard processes for collecting…

Disinformation has become a core concept in communications research, related to media, technological and political phenomena that complexify its definition and diagnosis. Although its approach has been mainly quantitative, focus groups have also been used to understand the perception of the audience of this particular issue. This research is part…

The news site ro.sputnik.md is the Romanian language version of the Sputnik news website platform, owned by the Russian government, one of the main channels used by the Kremlin to disseminate mis- and disinformation across Russian borders. The current research aims to identify the frames associated with anti-COVID-19 vaccines, and the news values…

In this article, I examine how forms of new media, or social and digital media (SDM), can serve as conduits of participatory democracy while, at the same time, perpetuate the cannibalization of a cornerstone of democracy: public schools. I discuss how this new era of unprecedented access to content creation and dissemination has opened spaces and…

U.S. print news coverage of COVID vaccine hesitancy represents a departure from previous depictions of vaccine skepticism as a problem of wrong belief. This article reports on a mixed methods study of 334 "New York Times" texts about COVID nonvaccination and vaccine hesitancy published between December 2020-December 2021. Texts were…

Online misinformation regarding COVID-19 has undermined public health efforts to control the novel coronavirus. To date, public health organizations' efforts to counter COVID-19 misinformation have focused on identifying and correcting false information on social media platforms. Citing extant literature in health communication and psychology, we…

My dissertation seeks to explore opportunities for disruptions--moments of learning in (digitally) networked spaces that seek to challenge, subvert, and reimagine our worlds. Drawing primarily on sociocultural theories of literacy and learning, I explore the ways that learning, mediated by digital technologies, takes place in formal and informal…