Reboot in Forbes
Reboot President Helen Lee Bouygues writes a regular column for Forbes on critical thinking, misinformation, and education.
How Do You Kill A Conspiracy Theory? With Media Literacy And Better Critical Thinking
Sept. 22, 2022
This summer, the Reboot Foundation surveyed more than 500 Americans and explored the intersection of conspiracies, science knowledge, critical thinking and media literacy. The survey found that about 25 percent of participants were open to believing at least one of the conspiracy theories we tested. People who rely heavily on social media for their information were more likely to believe. The survey also probed the participants’ exposure to media literacy principles in school, and found that people who had some media literacy education were 26 percent less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Other research backs this up. Simply, news-literacy and better critical thinking give people a fighting chance against conspiracy believers.
Critical Thinking Skills Not Emphasized By Most Middle School Teachers
August 17, 2022
A new Reboot paper, Teaching Critical Thinking in K-12: When There’s A Will But Not Always A Way, examines the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and found that the teaching of critical thinking skills is inconsistent across states and tends to drop as students get older. While 86 percent of 4th grade teachers said they put “quite a bit” or “a lot of emphasis” on deductive reasoning, that figure fell to only 39 percent of teachers in 8th grade. Deductive reasoning is one of the key skills in critical thinking, as it requires students to take a logical approach to turning general ideas into specific conclusions.
Will New EU Law Hold Social Media To Account?
July 20, 2022
A new EU law tightens content moderation requirements on major social media platforms. Large-scale social media platforms will be required to develop concrete plans to remove illegal content from their platforms. Platforms will also have to publicize details about the algorithms that recommend content to users, as well as giving them the option to opt out of these recommendation systems entirely. All of these ideas are steps in the right direction to lessening the addictive nature of social media and its harmful impacts on our mental health.
How to think through trade-offs
April 1, 2022
The mischaracterization of nuanced problems as black-and-white issues is one of the many tragedies of our highly polarized society. Knowing how to think through trade-offs when decision making is a skill everyone should master.
When Misinformation Becomes A Weapon: How You Can Fight Back
March 16, 2022
Misinformation and disinformation distort public discourse, disrupt the democratic process, and contribute to violence. But we now know better how to address these campaigns – and in knowing better we have the potential to do better.
Who’s Really Driving The ‘Freedom Convoys’?
Feb. 17, 2022
We are seeing two protests in one: The first, a true grassroots protest organized by a small group of anti-vax Canadian truckers, while a more more global protest is pushed by far-right social media agitators.