Information Overload: Finding and Evaluating Knowledge about Healthy Aging in the Information Age

While we are fortunate to live at a time when access to information is faster and easier than ever before, our current circumstances in the information age require us to be able to evaluate the quality of that information. Finding answers to our important questions and making life-altering decisions can be daunting tasks, and during that process we can easily feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that exists today. We must ask ourselves whether the information we see is based on extensive evidence, anecdotes, opinion, or some combination thereof. While most individuals would agree that it is best to make decisions that are informed and based on evidence, often scientific findings are presented in a way that makes it difficult for laypersons to find and understand. There are also helpful information literacy skills that we can develop in order to help protect ourselves from being misled, taken advantage of, and/or duped by existing information sources. This presentation will cover differences between scientific and nonscientific sources of information, provide an overview of the scientific process, help to make sense of some of the jargon and technical terms often used in scientific publications, and cover information literacy skills