Public lecture with Andy Oxman: Teaching children unbiased testing, can Professor Fair help?
Professor Andy Oxman is a member of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (NOKC), Oslo. The centre supports the development of quality in the health services by summarising research, promoting the use of research results, contributing to quality improvement, measuring the quality of health services, and working to improve patient safety.
In this presentation, Professor Andy Oxman illustrates that to avoid being misled we need to test the effects of treatments, including how effective they are, how safe they are and how much they cost.
This requires a comparison, for example comparing what happens with a treatment to what happens without the treatment.
Why teach children about fair tests of treatment? Helping children to make choices is a critical goal for education generally and health education specifically. Young children are able to understand the basic concepts necessary to assess claims about treatment effects.
Teaching science in primary education can produce the foundations for a scientifically literate population and especially in low-income countries it is possible to reach a large segment of the population that is well-grounded in science.