Citing a special issue article recently published in Educational Psychologist, UMD College of Education reports:

From the coronavirus pandemic to climate change and presidential elections, misinformation surrounding important issues and current events is a growing and worrisome problem. Misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 virus, for instance, has permeated social media and is even being perpetuated by some world leaders, prompting public health officials to correct inaccuracies.

Researchers like Doug Lombardi, associate professor in COE’s Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, likens today’s flood of misinformation as living in a ‘post-truth era,’ where conjecture and emotional appeal are more important than logic and scientific reasoning in influencing public opinion.

“It’s a perfect storm of information availability, particularly through social media, and the rapid way that we can each distribute information, such as through Twitter,” Dr. Lombardi said.

Read the rest of the article here.

Read the cited paper here.

The SLRG has been supportive of the various conference cancellations due to the COVID-19 outbreak, although we are disappointed to not be able to share our work more broadly. We have collected our intended presentations here, and we hope that you will find them useful. Please feel free to reach out to any of the authors!

NARST 2020, March 15-18, Portland, OR

Klavon, T. Relationships Between Students’ Scaffolded Small-Group Discussions and their Written Scientific Explanations.

Klavon, T., Bailey, J., Lombardi, D.,  & Dobaria, A. Students’ Plausibility Shifts and Knowledge Gains When Evaluating Competing Explanatory Models about Freshwater Resource Availability.

AERA 2020, April 18-21, San Francisco, CA
Matewos, A. A., Lombardi, D., Bailey, J. M., & Herrick, I. (2020). From science student to conceptual agent: Examining the individual shifts in engagement during scaffolded instruction.

Lombardi, D., & Bailey, J. M. (2020). Science strategy interventions. Poster accepted for presentation as part of the symposium, “Investigating strategies and strategy use: Where do we go from here?”

Check out Doug Lombardi’s presentation, The Curious Case of Active Learning, at the Educational Psychology Colloquium at UMD (9/10/19)!