The educational researchers have discovered “fake news” and are beginning to investigate just how easily students are misled by online content. A friend of ours in presenting as part of an AERA session on this issue and shared access to the papers from the session. We are usually at AERA but this year we are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean instead.
The Sam Wineberg paper caught my attention and he referenced a recent publication from the Stanford History Education Group that is investigating issues associated with what they describe as “civic reasoning in a social media environment” (translate this as how to avoid fake news if the chosen title sounds too pretentious). With difference discipline areas making pitches for the different generalizable thinking skills developed by their discipline (e.g., coding), the historians should make their case for critical thinking. This is more about what you learn from “doing history” rather than reading about the history written by others. Some call it the “historians craft” and it involves techniques for the careful collection, interpretation, and integration of information. The Stanford group call the application of these skills to online information “civic reasoning”.
The paper I reference above suggests that the checklists educators have been using to help students learn to evaluate the quality of online information have become dated and no longer satisfy the needs of evaluating purposefully generated and sophisticated looking online propaganda (information slanted for a purpose). The group conducts research in this area and offers suggestions. If interested, I suggest you take a look at their research materials which are available online (you will be asked to register).
One of the things they have done is to contrast the activities of individuals who would qualify as fact checkers and contrast their behavior with others taking a more standard approach. They suggest that fact checkers use search results (the display with all of the hits) to evaluate the top result before reading that result. They use the snippets of information associated with the other results to identify contrasting positions on the search topic. They also note that more skilled fact checkers take advantage of the web to locate other content generated by a given source and to investigate other takes on the same topic. In other words, take advantage of the web to investigate content appearing on the web.
I also like their recommendation that teachers model this complex skill – this has been a tactic I think is underutilized in developing higher order thinking skills. Use a projection system so that a class of students can watch as a teacher demonstrates and thinks aloud as skills such as those suggested by this research group are applied. Ask students for suggestions related to the example being evaluated.