̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Nuffield Foundation

Uncertainty about facts can be reported without damaging public trust in news – study

fpjl2 — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 16:33:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��numbers that drive headlines – those on Covid-19 infections, for example – contain significant levels of uncertainty: assumptions, limitations, extrapolations, and so on.

Experts and journalists have long assumed that revealing the 'noise' inherent in data confuses audiences and undermines trust, say ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers, despite this being little studied.

Now, new research has found that uncertainty around key facts and figures can be communicated in a way that maintains public trust in information and its source, even on contentious issues such as immigration and climate change.

Researchers say they hope the work, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, will encourage scientists and media to be bolder in reporting statistical uncertainties.

“Estimated numbers with major uncertainties get reported as absolutes,” said Dr Anne Marthe van der Bles, who led the new study while at Cambridge’s Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication.

“This can affect how the public views risk and human expertise, and it may produce negative sentiment if people end up feeling misled,” she said.

Co-author Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, said: “Increasing accuracy when reporting a number by including an indication of its uncertainty provides the public with better information. In an era of fake news that might help foster trust.”

̽��ֱ��team of psychologists and mathematicians set out to see if they could get people much closer to the statistical 'truth' in a news-style online report without denting perceived trustworthiness.

They conducted five experiments involving a total of 5,780 participants, including a unique field experiment hosted by BBC News online, which displayed the uncertainty around a headline figure in different ways.

̽��ֱ��researchers got the best results when a figure was flagged as an estimate, and accompanied by the numerical range from which it had been derived, for example: '…the unemployment rate rose to an estimated 3.9% (between 3.7%–4.1%)'.

This format saw a marked increase in the feeling and understanding that the data held uncertainty, but little to no negative effect on levels of trust in the data itself, those who provided it (e.g. civil servants) or those reporting it (e.g. journalists).

“We hope these results help to reassure all communicators of facts and science that they can be more open and transparent about the limits of human knowledge,” said co-author Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Catherine Dennison, Welfare Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “We are committed to building trust in evidence at a time when it is frequently called into question. This study provides helpful guidance on ensuring informative statistics are credibly communicated to the public.”

̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most experiment participants were recruited through the online crowdsourcing platform Prolific. They were given short, news-style texts on one of four topics: UK unemployment, UK immigration, Indian tiger populations, or climate change.

Uncertainty was presented as a single added word (e.g. ‘estimated’), a numerical range, a longer verbal caveat – 'there is uncertainty around this figure: it could be somewhat higher or lower' – or combination of these, as well as the ‘control’ of a standalone figure without uncertainty, typical of most news reporting.

They found that the added word did not register with people, and the longer caveat registered but significantly diminished trust – the researchers believe it was too ambiguous. Presenting the numerical range (from minimum to maximum) had the right balance of signaling uncertainty with little evidence for loss of trust.

Prior views on contested topics within news reports, such as migration, were included in the analysis. Although attitudes towards the issue mattered for how facts were viewed, when openness about data uncertainty was added it did not substantially reduce trust in either the numbers or the source.

̽��ֱ��team worked with the BBC to conduct a field experiment in October 2019, when figures were released about the UK labour market.

In the BBC’s online story, figures were either presented as usual, a ‘control’, or with some uncertainty – a verbal caveat or a numerical range – and a link to a brief survey. Findings from this 'real world' experiment matched those from the study’s other 'lab conditions' experiments.

“We recommend that journalists and those producing data give people the fuller picture,” said co-author Dr Alexandra Freeman, Executive Director of the Winton Centre.

“If a number is an estimate, let them know how precise that estimate is by putting a minimum and maximum in brackets afterwards.”

Sander van der Linden added: “Ultimately we’d like to see the cultivation of psychological comfort around the fact that knowledge and data always contain uncertainty.”

“Disinformation often appears definitive, and fake news plays on a sense of certainty,” he said.

“One way to help people navigate today’s post-truth news environment is by being honest about what we don’t know, such as the exact number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK. Our work suggests people can handle the truth.”

Last month, David Spiegelhalter launched a podcast about statistics, ‘Risky Talk’. In the first episode he discusses communicating climate change data with Sander van der Linden and Dr Emily Shuckburgh, leader of the ̽��ֱ��’s new climate initiative Cambridge Zero.

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A series of experiments – including one on the BBC News website – finds the use of numerical ranges in news reports helps us grasp the uncertainty of stats while maintaining trust in data and its sources.

Ultimately we’d like to see the cultivation of psychological comfort around the fact that knowledge and data always contain uncertainty

Sander van der Linden

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Report examines origins and nature of ‘maths anxiety’

cjb250 — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:01:45 +0000

̽��ֱ��report was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, with additional support from the James S McDonnell Foundation.

̽��ֱ��UK is facing a maths crisis: according to a 2014 report from National Numeracy, four out of five adults have low functional mathematics skills compared to fewer than half of UK adults having low functional literacy levels.

While mathematics is often considered a hard subject, not all difficulties with the subject result from cognitive difficulties. Many children and adults experience feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a maths problem.

A report published today by the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge explores the nature and resolution of so-called ‘mathematics anxiety’.

Origins of maths anxiety

In a sample of 1,000 Italian students, the researchers found that girls in both primary and secondary school had higher levels of both maths anxiety and general anxiety.

More detailed investigation in 1,700 UK schoolchildren found that a general feeling that maths was more difficult than other subjects often contributed to maths anxiety, leading to a lack or loss of confidence. Students pointed to poor marks or test results, or negative comparisons to peers or siblings as reasons for feeling anxious.

“While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students that we interviewed,” says Dr Denes Szucs from the Department of Psychology, the study’s lead author.

Students often discussed the role that their teachers and parents played in their development of maths anxiety. Primary-aged children referred to instances where they had been confused by different teaching methods, while secondary students commented on poor interpersonal relations.

Secondary students indicated that the transition from primary to secondary school had been a cause of maths anxiety, as the work seemed harder and they couldn’t cope. There was also greater pressure from tests – in particular, SATS – and an increased homework load.

Relationship between maths anxiety and performance

In a study published in 2018, the researchers showed that it is not only children with low maths ability who experience maths anxiety – more than three-quarters (77%) of children with high maths anxiety are normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests.

“Because these children perform well at tests, their maths anxiety is at high risk of going unnoticed by their teachers and parents, who may only look at performance but not at emotional factors,” says Dr Amy Devine, the 2018 study’s first author, who now works for Cambridge Assessment English. “But their anxiety may keep these students away from STEM fields for life when in fact they would be perfectly able to perform well in these fields.”

However, it is almost certainly the case that in the long term, people with greater maths anxiety perform worse than their true maths ability. Today’s report includes a review of existing research literature that shows that this can lead to a vicious circle: maths anxiety leading to poorer performance and poorer performance increasing maths anxiety.

Recommendations

̽��ֱ��researchers set out a number of recommendations in the report. These include the need for teachers to be conscious that an individual’s maths anxiety likely affects their mathematics performance. Teachers and parents also need to be aware that their own maths anxiety might influence their students’ or child’s maths anxiety and that gendered stereotypes about mathematics suitability and ability might contribute to the gender gap in maths performance.

“Teachers, parents, brothers and sisters and classmates can all play a role in shaping a child’s maths anxiety,” adds co-author Dr Ros McLellan from the Faculty of Education. “Parents and teachers should also be mindful of how they may unwittingly contribute to a child’s maths anxiety. Tackling their own anxieties and belief systems in maths might be the first step to helping their children or students.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say that as maths anxiety is present from a young age but may develop as the child grows, further research should be focused on how maths anxiety can be best remediated before any strong link with performance begins to emerge.

“Our findings should be of real concern for educators. We should be tackling the problem of maths anxiety now to enable these young people to stop feeling anxious about learning mathematics and give them the opportunity to flourish,” says Dr Szucs. “If we can improve a student’s experience within their maths lessons, we can help lessen their maths anxiety, and in turn this may increase their overall maths performance.”

Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “Mathematical achievement is valuable in its own right, as a foundation for many other subjects and as an important predictor of future academic outcomes, employment opportunities and even health. Maths anxiety can severely disrupt students’ performance in the subject in both primary and secondary school. But importantly - and surprisingly - this new research suggests that the majority of students experiencing maths anxiety have normal to high maths ability. We hope that the report’s recommendations will inform the design of school and home-based interventions and approaches to prevent maths anxiety developing in the first place.”

Background

Researchers worked with more than 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy to examine both maths anxiety and general anxiety, and gain a measure of mathematics performance. They then worked one-to-one with the children to gain a deeper understanding of their cognitive abilities and feelings towards mathematics.

This is the first interview-based study of its kind to compare the mathematics learning experiences of a relatively large sample of students identified as mathematics anxious with similar children that are not mathematics anxious. Although further in-depth studies are needed to substantiate and expand upon this work, the findings indicate that the mathematics classroom is a very different world for children that are mathematics anxious compared to those that are not.

Reference
Understanding Mathematics Anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. 14 March 2019

A report out today examines the factors that influence ‘maths anxiety’ among primary and secondary school students, showing that teachers and parents may inadvertently play a role in a child’s development of the condition, and that girls tend to be more affected than boys.

While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students

Denes Szucs

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Maths blackboard

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̽��ֱ��educational neuroscience of dyslexia and dyscalculia

bjb42 — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Developmental dyslexia, which manifests as a difficulty in reading and spelling, affects about 7% of schoolchildren, mostly boys, and presents a major obstacle to educational success, future mental health and lifetime earning. Its mathematical counterpart, developmental dyscalculia, affects about 6% of schoolchildren and is found equally in boys and girls. According to figures released from the UK Government Office for Science, dyscalculia has an even higher impact on educational success than dyslexia.

Early diagnosis and appropriate educational support are known to have lasting benefits for children and adults affected by these disorders. To get this right, a better understanding is needed of how the brain acquires reading and maths skills, and the new field of educational neuroscience is helping to find the answers. In the forefront of these studies is Cambridge’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education. With £2 million recent funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC), the researchers at the Centre aim to discover neural markers for dyslexia and dyscalculia through brain imaging techniques. This will enable affected children to be identified as early as possible and for targeted remediation to be delivered.

A world first

̽��ֱ��Centre for Neuroscience in Education was the first neuroscience laboratory in the world to be established within a Faculty of Education. Launched formally in 2005, with an inaugural conference that attracted 220 teachers and educators from over 15 countries, the Centre now has a team of 24 students and researchers. Staff are trained in a variety of disciplines, spanning psychology, education, medicine, linguistics and physics. ̽��ֱ��Centre is directed by Professor Usha Goswami, with Dr Dénes Szucs as ̽��ֱ�� Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Education. In November 2010, the Centre moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology in order to take advantage of on-site new high performance data networks and infrastructure for neuroscience.

From electrochemical signals to education

̽��ֱ��main brain imaging technology used in the Centre is the electroencephalogram (EEG), a technique that can measure the voltage changes that are caused by the electrochemical activity of brain cells. Whenever a child (or adult) is thinking or feeling, tiny electrical changes occur in the brain. These changes can be measured by sensitive electrodes that are placed on the skin of the scalp, mounted in a special hairnet that enables direct recordings of brain activity to be taken. ̽��ֱ��technique is painless, the electrodes are easy to put on and the children enjoy the measurement sessions.

But how can these electrical measurements tell us anything about the process of learning? A developmental dyslexia project is making this link by following over 100 children on a yearly basis for five years, making brain measurements at the same time as analysing speech processing, auditory processing, reading and spelling. One area of particular focus is a specific difficulty in processing the sound patterns of words, a skill called phonological awareness, which has been known for over 20 years to be the hallmark of developmental dyslexia.

̽��ֱ��sound of syllables

Children with dyslexia find it difficult to decide whether words rhyme and to count the number of syllables in a word like oasis. One reason is that aspects of the auditory signal in speech are processed less efficiently by the dyslexic brain.

In a simple auditory tone task that has now been used with dyslexic children learning languages as diverse as English, Spanish, Chinese and Finnish, scientists at the Centre have shown that one particular sound parameter is more difficult to discriminate. A bit like the difference in the onset of loudness between a trumpet note and a violin note, there is a difference in the rate of onset of loudness that occurs as we produce syllables; the Cambridge researchers have found that this is impaired in developmental dyslexia. In fact, this processing difficulty means that children with dyslexia are impaired in any auditory rhythmic task – including perceiving metrical structure in music and tapping along to a beat.

Reading in rhythm

To further complicate matters, the way in which the pre-literate brain represents language is fundamentally different to the way in which the literate brain represents language. Learning to read changes the brain because learning an alphabet makes us conceptualise spoken words in terms of their spelling patterns. We automatically hear spoken language as a series of the kinds of sounds represented by letters (e.g. we hear cat as c + a + t); this connection between sounds and letters is called phonics. ̽��ֱ��dyslexic brain does not have the auditory distinctions efficiently in place to which phonics instruction can be easily linked.

Currently, the main remediation offered to children with developmental dyslexia is yet more intensive instruction in phonics. Instead, the research in Cambridge suggests that interventions based on rhythm and even music may be beneficial, at much earlier ages. Rhythm is more overt in music than in language, and other projects at the Centre have shown that being able to sing in time with music is predictive of syllable and rhyming skills, and that training in rhythm improves phonological awareness. Several educational interventions based on musical and speech rhythms are currently being developed at the Centre.

Magnitude of the problem

̽��ֱ��MRC project on dyscalculia is just beginning but, here too, the neurological basis of the disorder is under scrutiny because a distinct area in the brain’s parietal cortex seems to be specialised for understanding magnitude. Children with dyscalculia have enormous difficulties in making decisions about quantities, such as ‘how much is four?’ Intriguingly, however, scientists at the Centre have shown that the main sensory marker of magnitude difficulties – being slower to make judgements about numbers that are closer together than further apart – is not deficient in children with dyscalculia. But these children do have very poor working memories, finding it both difficult to keep relevant information in mind and to recognise mistakes.

When children start learning maths at school, changes largely occur in the language areas of the brain. ̽��ֱ��ensuing neural connections that form between memory, magnitude and decision-making processes may underlie what goes wrong in dyscalculia. This hypothesis will be explored using a variety of non-invasive imaging techniques at the Centre and in collaboration with the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, in an effort to use spatial imaging technologies to deliver exact information about where the affected networks are in the brain.

With foresight

̽��ֱ��Centre is also beginning to have an input into Government policy. Professor Goswami was the scientific co-ordinator for Learning Difficulties within the Government Office of Science ‘Foresight’ project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing in 2008, one of three Cambridge scientists in the lead team (along with Professors Barbara Sahakian and Felicia Huppert). If the recommendations of the Foresight project are implemented nationally, then the insights from brain science for education will eventually be reflected in the basic training of all the teachers in the country. When that happens, all university Departments of Education will need some expertise in brain science - and as the Centre retains strong links with the Faculty of Education, Cambridge will be well-placed to contribute to such new training.

For more information, please contact the author, Professor Usha Goswami (ucg10@cam.ac.uk), at the Centre for Neuroscience in Education. Research at the Centre is funded by grants from the MRC, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), European Union, Leverhulme Trust and Nuffield Foundation.

For some children, acquiring the important skills of learning to read or do arithmetic is fraught with difficulty. Educational neuroscience is helping to understand why.

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