Teaching with evidence

In this age of real and fake news, students need to be able to assess the trustworthiness of evidence. The authors’ current research examines students’ use of evidence in secondary social studies classrooms as students deliberate contemporary public policy issues. The authors found that students shifted their evaluations of the trustworthiness of evidence depending on whether they were making these assessments in the abstract or in the context of a specific issue. In the abstract, evidence like statistical data ranked high, but when students considered a policy issue, they gave greater weight to anecdote and personal experience. The authors offer several recommendations for teaching good evidence use.