Paul A. Kirschner

In 2017, Mirjam Neelen and I wrote a blog entitled Truth or Truthiness in which we discussed whether a study is trustworthy or whether it only seems to be trustworthy. We used the term truthiness to describe the latter. Truthiness is a word that Stephen Colbert – American comedian – came up with. Roughly it means: something that sounds plausible and therefore people prefer to believe it and hold on to it, without taking facts, logic, or any contradictory evidence into consideration. Truthiness shouldn’t be confused with trustworthiness because the latter means that you can actually rely on something as being honest or truthful (i.e., you can trust it).

This morning I found an email in my inbox from Richard Clark with whom I wrote a few articles including the 2006 article[1] on inquiry learning and how it as well as its synonymic approaches to…