HDYK Episode 5: Who’s asking? With Leon Walls Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

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How do you know?

HDYK Episode 5: Who’s asking? With Leon Walls

September 09, 2021 • Christie Bahlai • Season 1 • Episode 5

Sometimes, when researchers ask what seems to be a simple question, they get a lot of different answers. When they look closer, they see that their simple question may be made up of many questions, and how you ask them depends on how-and who- you measure. To make things more complicated, who’s asking the question- and who’s answering- can matter a lot. This becomes a huge problem when researchers use ‘easy’ samples for their work. Today on How Do You Know, we’re talking to Dr. Leon Walls, an associate professor in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont. He sits on the board of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching and his research, focusing on equity in science, has been funded by the Gund Institute and the National Science Foundation.

This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout out to Kristen Dowling and Emily Loccisano for managing our digital presence and branding. Music featured in this episode is Lifeforce 9 by Mr. ruiZ, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY-NC license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!

Transcript is available here.