I think educators need to broaden their approach to developing student critical thinking skills as applied to online content. I was reminded of what has become my new perspective when I read Alice Keelor’s recent post complaining about the tendency to share inaccurate Facebook posts. Her advice is to evaluate the credibility of the content before sharing and she offers multiple suggestions for how to do this. The resources she identifies would be quite useful to anyone willing to use them.
Educators have fallen into some variation of the “check before you share” approach offering techniques that range from simply considering the expertise of a source to more sophisticated techniques such as use of the cross checking resources Keelor identifies.
While applying these guidelines and procedures make sense, the “problem” is likely broader and will not be adequately addressed until individuals are able to accept their own role in accepting “fake news”. How is it we help students and ourselves recognize that we all are programmed to accept certain types of false information?
I use the descriptor “programmed” as it seems consistent with one of the arguments made in Lee McIntyre’s book “Post Truth”. Educators should understand what he means as it seems very similar to the notion of constructivism – each of us uses our existing knowledge to understand new inputs. Our existing knowledge, biased or not, plays a role in how we process an input and information that fits is easiest to understand and accept. You may be more likely to recognize this cognitive phenomenon by a more specific term – confirmation bias.
McIntyre’s book is one of the best sources I have reviewed that provides a broad description of the multiple factors that have come together to create such a risky setting for “learning in the real world”. The limitations of the learner is one factor I think educators overlook. There is also the problem of group conformity in situations when one is aware that a group one identifies with has a position on an issue. In Intro Psych, the classic study by Solomon Asch demonstrates just how susceptible people are to accepting a position advocated by a group when one would be very unlikely to take this position if acting independently. If you remember this study, it should be obvious how it applies to situations such as we now face when one political party takes one position and the other a very different position. You likely identify with one party or the other and just like the participants in the Asch research are easily influenced to accept faulty information supported by your group.
The careful processing of a source can in many cases function through the lens of “motivated cognition”. When these conditions apply, the challenge is more complicated than is likely to be solved by the recommendation that learners fact check. Such situations will require additional skills and likely outside intervention (perhaps participation in processing within a group with individuals who have different perspectives). Educational researchers might recognize the value of purposefully created conceptual conflict as a useful approach when the facts of science are inconsistent with the self-generated models of causation learners may develop based on personal experience.
I will offer a more complete description of McIntyre’s list of factors in another post.