Filed under: Teaching
I mentioned the “Frauds and Fantastic claims in Archaeology” course that I am TAing for this semester shortly in my last post so I figured I would share something interesting that has (already) come out of the class.
The assigned textbook for the class is the most recent (2011) edition of Kennth L. Feder’s “Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology”. In the introductory chapter Feder discusses a survey he gives to his students every year on their belief in fantastic claims. While many of the questions focus on generally fantastic claims from all scientific disciplines, p5 has figures of responses to his questions regarding belief in Atlantis and Ancient Astronauts (see image below).
Note the spike in agreement around the year 2000 - does this correspond with the real dawn of the internet age or with the beginning of dominance of Discovery channel type media? Total speculation on my part, but interesting nonetheless
Naturally, we conducted a similar survey (albeit it with questions directly related to topics that will be covered in the course) through the google docs survey function to start compiling data through the next few years. While the data can’t quite be explored in terms of interesting trends seen in Feder’s figures we still got some interesting results. The survey was sent out to students in the class and they were told to take it and send it to someone you know who is currently not enrolled in an academic institution, and while not everyone responded we ended up with reasonable sample sizes for the purposes of the course (123 students and 80 non-students). Now the survey is nascent and will be tweaked, and we played around with a source-of-information question that while promising, will need to be altered to get nay meaningful results in the following years. Anyway, the results are shown in th figure below. What was most interesting to me was the consistently higher number of “don’t know” responses in the student sample versus the increased level of relative certainty of position of the non-student sample (and often more certainty towards belief in a fantastic claim). What does this mean? My working hypothesis is that students enrolled in the class realize they are supposed to be thinking critically but do not currently have the evidence available to them make a decision so it is better to respond with “don’t know” (note – we have discussed the sensationalism common to Discovery channel programming in class already). Conversely the non-student group is quite simply, not in the class, and are more prone to persuasion by popular-media on the subjects as most would theoretically lack the archaeological expertise/knowledge to evaluate claims and the evidence (if any) used to support them. I stress that these are only hypotheses and would require questions relating to them being posed on next year’s survey – like one on the degree of “don’t know” (not knowing the evidence vs. uncertainty in evaluating evidence etc.) or a better question relating to most common source for archaeological information. Anyway, the results are below, comment if you see any interesting patterns you’d like to discuss. The last striking thing is that the survey was conducted after our lectures on bigfoot…and for some reason a small number of students seem to still think bigfoot is a real animal…I guess they weren’t there for that lecture, or, they just want to believe regardless of the lack of support for such claims.
Student sample (n=123)
Non-student sample (n=80)
References cited in this post:
Feder, K. L. (2011). Frauds, myths, and mysteries: Science and pseudoscience in archaeology (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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