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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Stanford History Education Group; Sample activities

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning-the ability to judge the credi...

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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between.

Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed." So what should you do? You want to be informed, but a good deal of the information out there is incorrect or biased. Here are some things to keep an eye out for when reading a news article.

1. Is the article missing citations, references, or links?

Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Authors include references and links to validate their story, so if an article is missing links and references, it is a huge red flag.

Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. The articles that you read should look similar to this one from LiveScience.com's article, "Why Do We Fall for Fake News?" Check out the hyperlinks throughout the article. They help validate the information that the author wrote about.

2. Is the author's name missing?

An article without an author's name is another red flag. Most authors who put the time in to develop a well-researched news story like having their name attached to it. When an article is missing the name of the individual who wrote it, the reader isn't sure whether it's a trusted journalist who wrote the article or an angry teenager. Only consider trusting articles with an author's name attached to it.

3. If the author's name is listed, are they a trustworthy individual?

Do a Google search on the author's name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. Is the author an expert in their field? Have they written other well-researched articles? Do a quick background check on the author to determine their credibility.

4. What can you find in the "About Us" section of the website?

On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled "About Us." This section should give you a brief run-down of the mission and goals of the site. Do they aspire to post trustworthy news? Do they have an authoritative team of journalists and writers? Or is it a website that allows the general public to post articles? Reading about the website that hosts the article can help you determine if they post trustworthy sources.

5. Are there spelling or grammatical errors found in the text?

Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. In addition, they often have others proofread their work. When spelling or grammatical errors are present, this shows that the author might have hastily posted the information or they may not be an authoritative expert in the content that they're writing about.

6. Are there any direct quotes that are incorrectly used or taken out of context?

Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google's search bar. Are you able to find that same quote on another website or did your search produce a quote that is a bit different than the one in the article? Writers sometimes modify quotes to change their meaning and to make their content persuade you into believing something that isn't 100% true.

7. Can you find a similar article on the Internet?

Do a simple keyword search on Google for a similar article. If you're unable to find anything remotely similar, chances are that the author didn't do their research, made up much of the information in the article, or are fully sharing their opinion on a topic - not factual news. Stick to trusting news articles that have similar pieces found on the Internet.

8. Does the article only showcase one side of an argument?

News articles are essentially meant to inform you by showing all sides of a topic; the good, the bad, and the ugly. If an article only features one viewpoint, the reader should remind themselves that they're not seeing the full picture. Be cautious of news articles that only report one side of the story.

9. Does the headline not match the content of the article?

A headline can do more than provide a snippet of what the entire piece is about; it can also persuade us to believe something before we even read the article. Authors sometimes fabricate their headlines, knowing that you might walk away without reading the article and believing their claim. If the headline causes your eyes to pop out of your head, read the entire article first before deciding to trust the information or not.

10. Is the story completely outrageous?

If the story is unbelievable, chances are it is! Trust your gut instinct and check for many of items discussed in this article.

How can you prevent the spread of fake news?

If you believe something is incorrect, simply do not share it with others. Sharing fake news articles pushes them higher up in search result pages, causing others to come across them quickly and believing the content.

Some sites, such as Facebook, allow you to flag posts that are harmful or inappropriate. If you believe that a news story is false, make sure to report it to the host so they can take it down if necessary.

We know, it takes time to double check the information in news articles, but be an informed citizen and find out if what you're reading and sharing is factual or not.

References:

Richter, Greg. "Denzel Washington: Media Should 'Tell the Truth,' Stop 'BS'" Newsmax, 6 Dec. 2016, www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/media-truth-Denzel-Washington-BS/2016/12/06/id/762575/.

Sundar, S. Shyam. "Why Do We Fall for Fake News?" LiveScience, Purch, 9 Dec. 2016, www.livescience.com/57151-why-we-fall-for-fake-news.html.

Konnikova, Maria. "How Headlines Change the Way We Think." The New Yorker, Conde Nast, 17 Dec. 2014, www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/headlines-change-way-think.
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10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog

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For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed.

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Journalism; Ethics; Santa Clara University; Trust in the News

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The Trust Project - Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

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Identifying and highlighting the elements of quality journalism is the focus of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics' Trust Project.

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how. | School Library Journal

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how. | School Library Journal

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Media literacy courses help high school students spot fake news.

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Media literacy courses help high school students spot fake news.

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When the AP United States history students at Aragon High School in San Mateo, California, scanned the professionally designed pages of minimumwage.com, most concluded that it was a solid, unbiased source of facts and analysis. They noted the menu of research reports, graphics and videos, and the "About" page describing the site as a project of a "nonprofit research organization" called the Employment Policies Institute.

But then their teacher, Will Colglazier, demonstrated how a couple more exploratory clicks-critically, beyond the site itself-revealed the Employment Policies Institute is considered by the Center for Media and Democracy to be a front group created by lobbyists for the restaurant and hotel industries.

"I have some bright students, and a lot of them felt chagrined that they weren't able to deduce this," said Colglazier, who videotaped the episode in January. "They got duped."

One student responded loudly, "Fudge nuggets!"

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The exercise was part of "Civic Online Reasoning," a series of news-literacy lessons being developed by Stanford University researchers and piloted by teachers at a few dozen schools. The Stanford initiative launched in 2015, joining a handful of recent efforts to help students contend with misinformation and fake news online-a problem as old as dial-up modems but now supercharged by social media and partisan news bubbles. The backers of these efforts warn that despite young people's reputation as "digital natives," they are woefully unprepared to sort online fact from fiction, and the danger isn't just to scholarship but to citizenship.

Stanford's myth busters, led by education professor Sam Wineburg and doctoral student Sarah Cotcamp McGrew, have field-tested 15 news-literacy tasks of varying difficulty, with about 50 more in the works. Can middle-school students spot "native advertising" (ads masquerading as articles) on a crowded news website? Can high-school kids check the authenticity of an alarming image posted on Facebook? Will students investigate the sources of controversial claims? Will they seek corroboration? By and large, according to a report the group published in November, the answer in each case is no.

"Overall," the report concluded, "young people's ability to reason about the information on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak."

The news literacy initiative is based in the Stanford History Education Group that Wineburg founded in 2002 to train teachers how to use primary sources and help students critically evaluate historical claims. The group also created a free digital curriculum called " Reading Like a Historian " that's been downloaded more than 3 million times, according to Wineburg.

"We live in a world where our library begins with G," Wineburg said, for Google, and the Common Core's push for evidence-based reasoning falls flat if students trust everything that pops up in their Google search results.

Even before a deluge of fibs and fakery swamped our recent election cycle, Wineburg and company realized that readers of online news need many of the same skills used by a good historian, such as identifying the sources of claims and asking questions about their evidence. After all, what shows up in your Twitter or Facebook feed can come from anywhere, and a post-election BuzzFeed analysis suggested the fake stuff spreads faster than real news, thanks to hyper-partisan readers blindly sharing sensational headlines.

"This isn't just a problem with kids," said Wineburg. "Reliable information is to democratic functioning what clean air and water are to public health."

Fortunately, long-neglected civics education seems to be on the rebound in many states, which has helped groups like the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University get their message into K-12 classrooms. The center has run a course for undergraduates since 2007 and has since expanded into secondary schools by hosting summer teacher-training workshops and making course materials available online through its Digital Resource Center. In January, it plans to launch a massive online open course (aka MOOC) called " Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens."

One early K-12 adopter of the Center's news-literacy lessons was Janis Schachter, a social studies teacher at Northport High School in Long Island, New York. Schachter took one of the center's first summer trainings and has taught Northport's news-literacy course since 2011 as an elective that meets New York state's "participation in government" graduation requirement.

"My students are all about social media. They've never known life without it, and it's where they get all their information," said Schachter. "Whether that information is from a news organization or from your uncle, it all looks the same to them."

Gradually, Schachter's students learn how to sort through it all-to check for multiple, informed, and named sources, and for claims backed by evidence they can independently verify.

"I tell the kids, it's not fair that we have to do all this work, but the reality of the internet is that we do," said Schachter, who also stresses that students only need to verify news they plan to act on, whether by voting, protesting, or just spreading the story by sharing it.

Still, learning news-literacy skills is one thing, and the motivation to use those skills is another. If that tantalizing headline in our Facebook news feed fits our political outlook, why do the digging that might undermine it?

The fact that so many of us now get our news in partisan online echo chambers sets up "a perfect storm for fake news," according to Joe Kahne, an education professor at the University of California, Riverside.

In some good news, a new study Kahne co-authored, based on a national survey of young people ages 15 to 27, found that self-reported media-literacy training did make people significantly less likely to believe a factually inaccurate claim even if it aligned with their political point of view.

Kahne plans to study news-literacy efforts to discover what specific strategies get young people to value facts, whether they bolster their existing beliefs or contradict them. For now, one popular suggestion by news-literacy educators is to tap teenagers' instinctive aversion to people telling them what to think.

"One of the messages we've tried to stress more and more lately with the rise of fake news is this: Do you want to be fooled?" said Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy. "Wouldn't you rather make up your own mind?"
This story was produced by Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News

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When the AP United States history students at Aragon High School in San Mateo, California, scanned the professionally designed pages of minimumwage.com, most concluded that it was a solid, unbiased source of facts and analysis. They noted the menu of research reports, graphics and videos, and the "About" page describing the site as a project of a "nonprofit research organization" called the Employment Policies Institute.

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