I'm David Spiegelhulter, Professor for the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, and you are listening to you can handle the truth

on the BBC World Service. Over the next hour I'm going to take you to schools around the world to see how well children can learn to test the truthfulness of a claim.

When someone tells you someone drank juice and then their flu got better,

if somebody said that to you, how would you answer them?

I would think very carefully before taking that juice and I would turn the claim into a research question.

Meet the scientists of the future.

My name is I call Elizabeth Elizabeth and how old are you Elizabeth.

I'm in years this year making ten.

In our world of information overload all manner of media blurs what is truth and what is a tall tale

adults get fooled all the time so is it reasonable to expect children to be able to tell a

fact from what has come to be known the world over as fake news.

I would make two groups and I would give them different treatments and not to tell them

the treatments so that they could make fair comparisons.

Yeah, yeah that's what you do.

You do a proper study.

What Elizabeth is describing is a randomized trial, the gold standard of scientific research, and an impressive

concept to grasp in primary school.

But what she doesn't realize is that she has been part of a randomized trial herself,

one that is life and death implications in a country where sometimes dangerous practices of traditional healers are not uncommon.

Don't believe easily.

I'm here at the primary school on the outskirts of Kampala in Uganda, which is at the

center of a modern movement to teach children the kind of critical thinking skills that are necessary in the modern world

...