Chapter 12 page 273
CHAPTER 12c
Teaching for Belief Change
A. Instructional Techniques that Promote Belief Change
Here are five main methods that are effective in promoting belief change (Chinn & Brewer, 1993). To
illustrate these methods, I’ll provide an examples from a high school English teacher who is teaching a unit
on critical reasoning and wants to convince students that psychic detectives are not for real.
- Foster a general commitment to making beliefs consistent with evidence.
This means pointing out that our beliefs are often wrong, so that it’s important to make good decisions
about what to believe, based on the best available evidence. We just can’t believe what we want to believe.
It will not be easy to foster this general commitment in students. It has to be a constant focus of your
teaching.
EXAMPLE. Throughout the school year, the teacher demands that students back up what they say
with evidence. She often makes the point that beliefs that are not supported by evidence are likely to be
untrue, and so are not very reliable as a guide to behavior. She often points out cases in which her own
beliefs turned out to be wrong, and when she gave up faulty beliefs whenever the evidence suggested they
were incorrect. She encourages them to bring up cases in which they found out that their beliefs were
faulty.
- Teach students about the principles of reasoning that they need to know to evaluate evidence
properly. This, too, is a long-term project that begins the first day of school and must continue throughout
the new year. The teacher teaches principles of evidence so that students can distinguish between good and
poor evidence.
EXAMPLE. The teacher focuses throughout the school year on principles of evaluating evidence
about social phenomena. One particular focus is that single cases should be given less weight than
evidence from many cases, so a single vivid case should carry little weight in comparison with a study of
many cases.
A second focus is the importance of considering control groups. For instance, before concluding that a
psychic made correct predictions because of psychic powers, one needs to compare the predictions of
psychics with the predictions of nonpsychics. Because anyone will get a few predictions correct, either by
chance or by making good educated guesses, the fact that a psychic gets a few predictions right doesn’t say
anything, unless the psychic can get more predictions right than a nonpsychic. - Present a clear explanation of a plausible alternative theory. The new theory needs to give a
plausible explanation of the evidence that the student believes. The student needs to see that the new theory
could be true.
EXAMPLE. The teacher presents the theory that psychics sometimes make predictions that seem
impressively correct by making these predictions vague enough so that they would be consistent with a
wide range of outcomes. For instance, when a psychic says “The body will be found by water,” nearly any
place that the body is found will probably be near water of some kind—a river, a lake, a sink, a water pipe,
etc. So in fact, the prediction was almost guaranteed to come true, but people just don’t notice that almost
any outcome would be consistent with the prediction.