Last week you looked at the web resources and the quality of the information that you can find on the web. This week, it is important to continue the lessons that you learned last week by comparing scientific and non-scientific sources of information and asking whether the information in those sources is scientifically sound. Meaning do they have a solid scientific foundation. You can use the article/site you found last week as one of your articles/sites, or you can find two new articles/sites. One should be from a scientific source such as: a scientific journal (e.g.; Science; Popular Science; Nature); a government web site (e.g.: National Cancer Institute; FDA; CDC); or a recognized national organization (e.g.; Cancer Research Foundation; Susan G. Komen Foundation; etc.). The non-scientific source and be from any non-scientific source… they should be easy to find, usually they are trying to sell you something at the end of their article.
Compare them. Think about the sources of their information. Are their sources of information credible? Did they employ the scientific method? Is their scientific foundation to be trusted?
For this week’s discussion you can either post the web links to your papers/sites or the PDFs of your papers/sites.
State the scientific question the two papers/sites are trying to answer.
State the methods the papers/sites showed to get to their conclusions.
State whether you believe the articles have a solid scientific foundation. Why? Why not?
