From a post of mine at the beginning of the year:

I wonder what a difference it would make if every single high-school student was exposed to a few weeks of learning about double-blind RCTs [randomized control trials] in grade 9 or 11 or whatever grade you learned biology in. I actually think it would be a low cost-high reward intervention. Although we wouldn’t know how effective an intervention it was until we did an RCT on it.

From Ben Goldacre’s article in The Guardian this past weekend:

If every school taught the basics – randomised trials, blinding, cohort studies, and why systematic reviews are better than cherrypicking your evidence – it would help everyone navigate the world, and learn some of the most important ideas in the whole of science.

Clearly Goldacre didn’t get this idea from me, but I think potentially beneficial enough idea that I’m sure a lot of people have thought about it. Learning about how this kind of medical research works wouldn’t just help kids recognize good medical information from bad, it would help them identify any kind of good information from bad information.

Goldacre’s article relates the story of three young students (including a nine year old who conducted her own randomized trial and got published in one of the top medical journals) who explored the evidence and exposed certain sham medical treatments. It’s incredibly encouraging to see how these students could assemble good quality evidence to support their arguments. I definitely could not have done what they did at their age but with a couple classes learning about this kind of stuff, I’m sure we’d all be surprised with what high school students could come up with.