Twenty years ago it was easier to identify fake news. There were the tabloid papers in the grocery store checkout line and the sensationalized “news” programs that promised inside looks at celebrity lives. Now, between the number of online information sites and the proliferation of social media apps, plus near constant mobile phone use, determining a story’s credibility seems to call for advanced detective skills. In her edWebinar “Fight Fake News: Media Literacy for Students,” Tiffany Whitehead, School Librarian for the Episcopal School of Baton Rouge, says that’s exactly what we need to teach students. While today’s youth may be aware that not everything on the Internet is true, they don’t have the tools to evaluate accuracy and authenticity.
Education scholars say youth are duped by sponsored content and don't always recognize political bias of social messages. When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education.
The report, released this week by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.
Although we face a digital challenge, educators have relied on a distinctly analog approach to solving it. The most prominent digital literacy organizations in the United States and Canada instruct students to evaluate the trustworthiness of online sources using checklists of 10 to 30 questions. (Common Sense Media, the News Literacy Project, Canada’s Media Smarts, the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab, and the American Library Association all disseminate website evaluation checklists.) Such lists include questions like: Is a contact person provided? Are the sources of information identified? Is the website a .com (supposedly bad) or a .org (supposedly good)?
Elizabeth E Charles's insight:
Great argument for information/digital literacy being embedded into the curriculum rather than just relying on a one-shot session.
As an educator, you might be tired of receiving work from your learners with incorrect information from unreliable sources and websites. You might also be weary of them hitting the first link on their Google search as the extent of their research, or using Wikipedia as their only source for information. If this is you, have no fear because Information Fluency skills are the answer.
Back in the days when fake news was screaming about aliens visiting our planet or people coming back from death, it was easy to avoid publishers with rubbish information. Nowadays, an increased access to communication and media has led to the flood of false or useless information. As a result, even those people who want to avoid all this mess are not successful in spotting fraud.
A few days ago we published on our Facebook page this beautiful visual featuring some interesting tips to help you spot fake news. The visual is created by IFLA and is available for free download in PDF format. If you are looking for other resources to help you teach students how to spot fake news, the visual below is a good material to add to your list.
It’s on the news, almost every single day. Fake news is being shared, discussed, and analyzed frequently online and in the classrooms. Studies from Stanford to Pew Research have suggested that this topic has been and will continue to be affecting students and their information consumption and research needs but how can librarians make sense of fake news in the research workflow?
Web evaluation has been a standard information literacy offering for years and has always been a challenging topic for instruction librarians. Over time, the authors had tried a myriad of strategies to teach freshmen how to assess the credibility of Web sites but felt the efforts were insufficient. By familiarizing themselves with the cognitive development research, they were able to effectively revamp Web evaluation instruction to improve student learning. This article discusses the problems of traditional methods, such as checklists; summarizes the cognitive development research, particularly in regards to its relationship to the ACRL Information Literacy Standards; and details the instructional lesson plan developed by the authors that incorporates cognitive development theories.
One of the problems I've had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge. In the metaphor of most educators, there's a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there's data,…
In an age where the majority of us get our news through social media, the rise of fake news sites, hoaxes and misinformation online is concerning, especially considering that many young people lack the skills necessary to judge the credibility of information they encounter online.
Over the years I've written quite a bit Dan Russell's work and the concept of using images as the basis of web search challenge activities for students. Last month, Dr. Russell posted another fun search challenge that could be completed by middle school and high school students. That challenge is called Real or Fake?
With all the information they ever need right at their fingertips, it is imperative to teach students how to check their facts. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to know what is true and false, and students are struggling deciphering the truths from the falsehoods. According to Stanford University, their research “shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.”
Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research is an open book by Ohio State University Libraries. It is aimed at students and has chapters on questions, types of sources, precision searching, ethical use of information etc. etc.
We are constantly surrounded by information, and it is not always easy to know which sources to trust. Being able to evaluate the credibility of information is an important skill used in school, work, and day-to-day life. With so much advertising, controversy, and blogging going on, how do you sift through the chaff and cut to the chase?
No matter what discipline we teach, it is crucial to help students assess source credibility. It's a real-life skill that develops reasoning and analysis, and will protect them from scams and scammers as well as fake news!
I did a quick presentation for 6th graders on website evaluation. The link is the the Slides. I have added some notes on each slide to give a better idea of what I'm telling students. Here's a link to the bookmark I give them. I couldn't fit both "Appropriate" and "Accurate" on it, but most 6th graders at our school keep a JAR (Journal of Academic Research) so they paste the bookmark in their JAR and take notes next to it.
I also have students look at other sites and analyze in small groups, using what they learned in the presentation. Interestingly, I just spent the day at the local university learning from the librarians there about how they present research to freshman. One of the librarians mentioned she doesn't like the CRAP acronym because she doesn't want students to think currency is most important. So I will be sure to stress that to students. Could be a good discussion question for them, too!
Whether you call it “fake news”, “misinformation” or the more innocuous “spin,” and whether you see this as an entirely new problem or the continuation of an already existing problem (think “War of the Worlds,” “Yellow Journalism” and “Dewey Defeats Truman”), one thing is clear: there is a powerful and pressing need to prepare our youth to make sense of the constant flow of media information that they consume everyday.
Looking to test your students’ capabilities at figuring out if a website is real or not? Use these fake websites to help, but be careful! Looks may deceive you! Some of these sites are tougher to catch than others.
Studies suggest that many U.S. students are too trusting of information found on the internet and rarely evaluate the credibility of a website’s information. For example, a survey found that only 4 percent of middle school students reported checking the accuracy of information found on the web at school, and even fewer did so at home (New Literacies Research Team & Internet Reading Research Group, 2006). At the same time, the web is often used as a source of information in school projects, even in early schooling, and sites with inaccurate information can come up high in search rankings.
The Holocaust did not happen. At least not in the world of Google, it seems. One week ago, I typed “did the hol” into a Google search box and clicked on its autocomplete suggestion, “Did the Holocaust happen?” And there, at the top of the list, was a link to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi white supremacist website and an article entitled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen”.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
