Shakked Dabran
Shakked is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Education in Science & Technology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
In an age where phenomena of misinformation and conspiracy theories are becoming more common and more accessible in the online space, her Ph.D. research, under the supervision of Professor Ayelet Baram-Tsabari, focuses on how scientific literacy at the individual and societal levels can support people’s orientation capabilities in an information environment of varying epistemic quality. .
Shakked holds a BA in political science (2016, cum laude) and an MA in international relations (2018, Dean’s List) from the University of Haifa. She also holds an MBA (2021) from the Technion. Her multidisciplinary research background enables her to observe and examine phenomena from different angles, introducing a broad approach that results in unique insights.
Her current project:
How good is the quality of science information available online in my language?
In this project, we are launching a large-scale algorithmic audit of Google Search, and use a mixed-methods approach to study the quality of results in different countries and languages. The audit will issue a set of carefully curated scientific queries to Google Search in multiple languages, emulate their execution from different countries, and collect their search results over time. Our queries are selected to represent both theory- and data-driven approaches on a global scale. As part of this project, I focus on scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. vaccines cause autism, flat earth). Quality assessment of search results will be based on both quantitative and qualitative measures of quality, including scientific quality, pedagogical quality, source of origin, and recency.