El pensamiento y las prácticas científicas en la era de la post-verdad: promoviendo desempeños epistémicos en la escuela para una ciudadanía crítica y empoderada

The post truth era, described as a moment in history in which the presence of fake news, pseudo scientificbeliefs, negationist behaviors and conspiracy movements, among others, presents a challenge to scienceeducation at all educational levels.ESPIGA is a project framed in Science Education research focused on the development and analysis ofepistemic performances of students of different educational levels and pre-service teachers, with a focus onthe development of complex competences such as critical thinking and scientific practices in challengingcontexts. Our hypothesis is: by participating in well-designed teaching and learning activities that promotethe participation in the scientific practices of modeling, inquiry and argumentation to promote criticalthinking, both students and pre-service teachers will display and progressively improve their epistemicperformance and critical thinking skills in the science field.To do so, the strategy of the project is the identification of core design principles, the elaboration of teachingand learning activities and sequences, their implementation in practice and the analysis of students’ andpre-service teachers’ (PTs) productions to identify a) what are the epistemic performances of students andPTs in teaching and learning scenarios that reflect the complexities of the post truth era and b) whataffordances and difficulties can be identified in these context.Our main findings regarding the design principles that characterize teaching and learning resources thatpromote apt epistemic performance and critical thinking are a) the inclusion of different types of problematiccontexts, including emerging issues and controversies; b) the use of a variety of high demanding tasks thatinterrelate modeling, inquiry and argumentation and c) the inclusion of explicit teaching of and for criticalthinking focused on specific criteria to judge.Our main findings regarding the epistemic performance of both students and PTs when engaged in theteaching and learning activities designed by the project include: a variety of learning progressions regardingdifferent models in biology, geology, physics and chemistry; the identification of different critical thinkingskills used by students and the interrelation of the cognitive, emotional, metacognitive and socialdimensions in both epistemic performances and critical thinking at different levels for the different teachingand learning contexts analysed.Finally, the project identifies different affordances and difficulties for the development of apt epistemicperformance in school science, including progressive autonomy and use of skills by participating studentsand but also strong limitations regarding how to ensure basic knowledge to favor this progressive autonomyand how to evaluate students’ progression in the use of critical thinking skills.