Dr. Judy Brown from Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, TN presented at ASMCUE 2022 a Microbrew session entitled “Using Social Media to Enhance Science Literacy.” The goals of the session that Brown shared were to share the framework for this assignment and ideas for implementation. Brown asked the participants: how much time do undergraduate students spend on social media? One study from 2015 (Wang et al. ACM) cited 1.5 hours per day on social media. That study also calculated that students visit social media sites on average 118 times per day! Alarmed by the statistics cited in another meta study Suarez-Iledo 2021 of the high prevalence of health misinformation in social media, Brown designed an assignment to address this. The Social Media Reflection assignment starts with students finding a social media post relevant to the course that references a primary research article. Next, the student finds and cites the primary research article and writes a summary. The student then compares the post to the article. The student learning goals are to improve their ability to find science articles and summarize main findings. Brown shared an example of a student analysis of a post and article and described the specifications grading rubric used to provide feedback. Brown implemented the assignment in a virology course for upper-level biology majors with nine students. The end-of-semester surveys were overall positive. As an instructor, Brown noted that there are some limitations: many posts lack citations for scientific claims. The type of source article used should be clearly specified. I thought it was good that Brown explained that the post does not have to include misinformation. During the questions and discussion part of the session, it was good to learn that students have changed their minds and learned about sources of information. From the instructor perspective, the use of specifications grading is of personal interest. Brown also suggested using peer review as a modification for larger courses.
