O letramento científico e o pensamento crítico na era da hiperinformação : promovendo imunidade contra as pseudociências e a anticiência

Abstract

In the Era of hyper information, the Brazilian smartphones have become the main means of internet access, instant messaging applications, and social networks have occupied a preferred position as channel of information. Taking this context on account, our research problem has emerged: how scientific literacy and critical thinking can contribute for evaluation of the quality of scientific information spread in social media? Thus, the research aimed to investigate how an investigative and collaborative project, based on active learning methods, can contribute to deep our research participants’ scientific literacy and critical thinking, so that they are able to distinguish the internet informations as scientific, pseudoscientific, or unscientific ones; to diagnose if, and with which criteria, students verify the reliability of information they consume and/or share through the internet, and in addition to that, to assist them to produce a checklist, aiming to evaluate the reliability of the information spread in social media. Supported by a qualitative approach, with the required scientific rigor, we carried out a study case, with some action research elements, supported by our assumptions of Mario Bunge's epistemology, applying the #ChecandoComCiência project, from which we developed a didactic script and a website as educational products. The results allowed us to verify that the current problem of scientific misinformation in social media can be used, taking it as a good advantage to work on the scientific method knowledgement, and in the natural sciences education. Our research participants have demonstrated that they had changed their perception about the misinformation context, in addition to presenting a better critical vision, and ability to investigate and classify scientific information.