Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, Stuart Ritchie, The Bodley Head, £18.99
The magic phrase these days is “evidence-based education”. But the questions which needs to be asked is: how good is the quality of the evidence? This book does not have very much to say about education specifically, apart from shedding quite a bit of doubt on Dweck’s “growth mindset”. Nevertheless, it contains enough information to make us all sceptical of the kind of bold claims that are often made about some new “discovery” in fields such as psychology and neuroscience.
Even where there is no outright fraud involved, simple statistical errors, “publication bias” (the tendency for only positive results to be published) and perverse incentives can render “breakthroughs” less noteworthy when the studies reporting them are looked at more closely.
The final chapter provides instructions for reading scientific papers should be read by all educators, and also by those who are studying science subjects. Science Fictions is well written too.
This review originally appeared in Teach Secondary magazine.
See also my longer review published in January 2021:
Terry Freedman qualified as a teacher in 1975, has written for educational publications since 1989, and has published this website since 1995.
