By MARTY LEVINE

In 2022, when the “Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (i.e., UFOs) was issued by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Melanie Good got a call from the media for comment about UFOs’ “plausibility” — because she is Pitt’s “Basics of Space Flight” course instructor in Physics and Astronomy.

The call prompted Good to examine how people came to have pseudoscientific beliefs — that aliens are here, now, for starters. Before getting the media call, she had figured that not many people believed in extraterrestrial origins of random things spotted in Earth’s atmosphere. But now she realized they believed in little green men in surprising numbers.

As a science educator, she figured it would be appropriate to include more lessons on how to recognize pseudoscience — and how to correct such notions.

The best fit for these lessons, she thought, was departmental colleague Eric Swanson’s class, Physics and Society.

She and Swanson teamed to propose the idea for a project called “Candle in the Dark,” a learning module that helps students put aside “unwarranted beliefs.” It won funding from the latest round of Discipline-Based Science Education Research (dB-SERC) awards for innovative education programs.

Swanson — among whose specialties is science communication to the public — worked particularly on giving students a chance for self-reflection in the learning module, so they could begin to determine whether they had well-supported ideas.

Swanson wrote his Physics and Society course textbook decades ago partly with that purpose: “The motivation there was not to blast students with facts … but to tell students what science is and what its goals are,” he says. “I wanted students to be able to distinguish science and pseudoscience when they run into it.”

In the new learning module, Good says the pair wanted “to be very deliberate in telling them what science is not.”

The module employs smaller steps (“scaffolding,” in academic parlance), engaging in class and small-group discussions about evidence required to support or debunk claims. Students’ homework then allows them to read and reflect on the issue.

While it seems as if this era is rife with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, “nonsensical beliefs go back as far as I can trace and there seems to be no signs of them going away,” Swanson says. Today’s bad notions may have more of a political flavor related to, say, COVID or climate change, but there has always been “a pseudoscience du jour,” he says. “People used to talk about Bigfoot all the time and now they hardly talk about Bigfoot,” he notes, while other pseudoscientific beliefs, such as astrology, have persisted for thousands of years.

As part of in-class discussion in this new learning module, students are provided with links to evidence against pseudoscience, Good says. The idea, says Swanson, is to get students to consider: Did such-and-such belief originate from a discussion among their friends or from a real scientific source?

The human brain is trained to find patterns — to recognize dangers and survive. But this bias toward pattern-finding can run amok, Good notes. Sometimes humans start out by asking the right questions but don’t use the right methods to find an answer: “Some of these (pseudoscientific) claims might arguably stem from a perfectly valid scientific inquiry,” Good says. “The aim is to give tools to test things scientifically.”

The pair will be surveying students who use the still-developing learning module to see whether they have gained new assessment tools and how that has affected their beliefs. Good believes this module could someday be an app distributed widely for use in other science classes. Swanson says the pair would also like to fine tune the module for use in an even broader array of courses.

“I almost don’t care if they remember what Newton’s Second Law is,” Good says, “but if they come out with more notions of healthy skepticism and they can distinguish science from pseudoscience,” the new module will have done its job.

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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