Northern California's KQED public television and radio station offers a lot of quality educational resources for youth via their programming. The recently launched YouTube show, Above the Noise, is no exception. Hosted by Myles Bess and Shirin Ghaffary, this series is designed to help teenagers develop the skills to assess the validity of science news reports. In these short videos (approximately five minutes each), Bess and Ghaffary examine the kind of recent scientific headlines that affect teens, e.g. Does social media cause depression? Are energy drinks really bad for you? The hosts then examine the research studies behind these headlines through a series of critical questions: Does this study conflate causation with correlation? What was the sample size for this study? What questions are left unanswered by these studies? These short, highly engaging videos offer a useful resource for science or journalism classrooms.
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