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Learn more about fact-checking science information 

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Learn more about fact-checking science information 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZYSBlLRxfs

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KQED Teach: Supporting high quality media literacy instruction

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KQED Teach: Supporting high quality media literacy instruction

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KQED Education supports K-12 educators in instructing their students in how to be responsible, engaged digital citizens through free online courses, workshops, and a national Certification for Media Literacy Educators co-led by PBS.

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Free self-paced online courses and workshops on media making and teaching for all educators!

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KQED course: Evaluating Online Sources: Checking Facts and Identifying Misinformation

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KQED course: Evaluating Online Sources: Checking Facts and Identifying Misinformation

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Prepare your students to be savvy online researchers by giving them the tools they need to distinguish facts from misinformation. Gain confidence and resources for teaching how to evaluate information and spot unreliable sources. This media literacy course is provided to you FREE from public media station KQED.

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Prepare your students to be savvy online researchers by giving them the tools they need to distinguish facts from misinformation. Gain confidence and resources for teaching how to evaluate information and spot unreliable sources. This media literacy course is provided to you FREE from public media station KQED.

In this free, hands-on course you will

Evaluate online sources like a professional fact checker

Practice lateral reading and other fact-checking methods centered on a topic relevant to you and your curriculum or content area

Unpack how to recognize both reliable and unreliable sources whether researching online or scrolling social media

Create a lesson plan on any aspect of online source evaluation to build students' online research and evaluation skills in a way that aligns with your curriculum goals

Certificate of Completion

Earn a Certificate of Completion for 8 hours of professional development and get started on earning a PBS Media Literacy micro-credential.

Learning Objectives

Master the basics of evaluating sources and spotting misinformation to enhance instruction and support student learning, including:

Practicing current best practices to assess the accuracy and credibility of online sources in a variety of formats

Gaining strategies to support student in using search engines and evaluating the quality of online news and information sources

Understanding what misinformation, disinformation and propaganda are, the dangers of each, and how to combat them

Creating a lesson plan or online source evaluation activity that build students' ability to evaluate online sources for accuracy and credibility

Enroll now for free!

You will have four weeks to complete the assignments in this course and receive a Certificate of Completion. If you would like to continue to access the course content after those 4 weeks, you are welcome to re-enroll. There is no penalty for taking the course multiple times.

Your Instructors

We support educators in integrating video storytelling, audio podcasts and other media literacy skills into their teaching practice.

Rachel Roberson

Rachel is KQED's program manager for humanities professional learning. Previously, she was an English and social studies classroom teacher and teacher leader in San Francisco, Oakland, Austin and internationally. Before becoming a teacher, she was a newspaper reporter in the Bay Area.

PBS Media Literacy Educator Certification by KQED

This course helps prepare you to apply for the Evaluating Online Information micro-credential on Digital Promise.

Earn all 8 micro-credentials (MCs) to become a certified PBS Certified Media Literacy Educator.

Recommended Learning Path

Ready for more? Try one of these courses next.

About KQED

KQED is a nonprofit, public media station and NPR and PBS member station based in San Francisco that offers award-winning education resources and services free to educators nationwide. KQED Teach is a collection of professional development courses that empower educators to teach media literacy, make media for the classroom and lead media-making projects with students in K-12.

Have a question? Email us at [email protected] or check out our FAQ. Find out about our district supports here.

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Evaluating Online Sources: Checking Facts and Identifying Misinformation

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Prepare your students to be savvy online researchers by giving them the tools they need to distinguish facts from misinformation. Gain confidence and resources for teaching how to evaluate information and spot unreliable sources. This media literacy course is provided to you FREE from public media station KQED.

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Common Sense Education's Digital Citizenship Curriculum 

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Common Sense Education's Digital Citizenship Curriculum 

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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Educational Videos:

Navigating Digital Information series on YouTube teaches the audience fact-checking skills that journalists use to do their jobs - anyone can learn how to fact-check misinformation on the internet. Hosted by best-selling author and MediaWise Ambassador, John Green, this series was produced in partnership with Complexly, Green's production company and published on the @CrashCourse channel on YouTube.
MediaWise Voter Guide
The MediaWise Voter Project partnered with Complexly, best-selling author John Green's production company on a 2020 election guide for first-time voters called the MediaWise Voter Guide. It's an 8-part YouTube video series hosted by influencer Evelyn from the Internets. By watching this series, first-time voters learn how to navigate the confusing online information ecosystem of political news so they can feel confident they are informed with the facts when voting for the first time in November.
How to Vote In Every State
This is a 54-part, short-format video series on YouTube which teaches first-time voters (and really anyone!) how to register to vote and how to actually cast their ballot in their state. If you live in Texas, you watch the Texas video. If you live in Missouri, you watch the Missouri video, etc. This series was created in partnership with Complexly as well. It was recently updated to include more up-to-date information about the impact of coronavirus and voting as well.
Campus Correspondents TikTok Videos
The MediaWise Voter Project Campus Correspondents have produced 50 short-form (about 1:00 minute) fact-checking and media literacy videos teaching first-time voters how to find reliable information about the election to help combat voter suppression misinformation that is running rampant across platforms. Here is an example of a fact-checking video. Here is an example of a general media literacy tip video. You can find additional samples on our TikTok account here.

You'll also find their fact-checking videos from our friends at PolitiFact that are part of their 'Truth-o-Meter Minute' fact-checking series which are also super cool and performing well.
Animated Video Series:
MediaWise is producing a 4-part, 1-minute animated (cartoon-style) video series teaching digital media literacy tips to first-time voters. Through this popular social media video format, first-time voters will learn fact-checking skills including lateral reading, 3 key questions you can ask yourself to fact-check info on your feeds, and other helpful quick hit tips. There will be vertical and horizontal formats posted and promoted across platforms. This series launches the week of September 8. This series is supported by Becker Trust.
MediaWise PSA featuring many of our ambassadors: Stop the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation
MediaWise for Seniors social media campaign links

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Our mission at MediaWise is to empower people of all ages to be more critical consumers of content online. We teach people key digital literacy skills to spot misinformation and disinformation so they can make decisions based on facts, not fiction. We believe that when facts prevail, democracy wins.

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Don’t believe what you see – digging deeper for the truth – Linking Learning

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How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding …

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TikTok is a vibrant place for creative and authentic expression. In addition to fun and engaging content, TikTok also serves as a place for learning and education. However, as content and social platforms increasingly encounter the challenges of misinformation, it can be difficult for users to identify truths from falsehoods. Such misinformation or deliberate disinformation can cause real world harm, and is antithetical to building a trust-based community where authentic interactions can thrive. Hence, we feel a deep sense of responsibility to protect and improve our users' learning experience on TikTok and curb the proliferation of fake news.

We have increased our efforts to identify unverified content circulating on the internet that may appear to the public as 'facts' or 'news'. Additionally, we have put systems in place to allow our users to easily report misinformation in-app, and expanded our in-house team responsible for detecting and preventing misinformation and disinformation.

To bolster these efforts, we're pleased to announce that we have kicked off our Asia Pacific Fact-Checking Programme in partnership with industry-leading fact-checkers AFP and Lead Stories. This third-party fact-checking program leverages a team of fact-checkers who review and verify reported content. Once the information is confirmed to be false or misleading, we take proactive steps to remove the content in line with our Community Guidelines and notify the user accordingly.

We're committed to fighting against dangerous, medical and election misinformation, synthetic media, fake news, and conspiracy theories on our platform with this new Fact-Checking Program. This partnership will see AFP covering markets including Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan and Lead Stories expanding their coverage to Thailand and Korea. It will also examine and provide recommendations around specific functions, including policy, product and process.

AFP is an international news agency that provides fast, comprehensive, and verified coverage of global events, while Lead Stories is a fact-checking platform that strives to develop common standards for information credibility. Both of these platforms provide coverage in multiple languages, and have experience in working with other globally-recognised social media platforms.

In improving our overall trust and safety policies and processes, we are continuing our work to help make the platform an inclusive and safe space for all. Earlier this month, we launched our Asia Pacific Safety Advisory Council, which will help to provide advice on content moderation policies and trust and safety issues specific to Asia Pacific. Building on our commitment to transparency, we also released our global Transparency Report for the first six months of 2020, which details how we are working to create a safe and secure platform for our growing and diverse community.

Misinformation and disinformation are challenges the industry continues to face and we believe our Asia Pacific Fact-Checking Program will help ensure that our users can continue creating and learning on TikTok, safely and confidently.

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TikTok partners with fact-checking experts to combat misinformation

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TikTok is a vibrant place for creative and authentic expression. In addition to fun and engaging content, TikTok also serves as a place for learning and education. However, as content and social platforms increasingly encounter the challenges of misinformation, it can be difficult for users to identify truths from falsehoods.

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In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.

Once students have completed the starter course they can move on to any number of additional topical modules we will be rolling out. The topical modules go into more depth on skills, and explore specific social issues around information pollution.

Each lesson has multiple pages and activities. After clicking through to each lesson, you can use the list of links at the bottom of the first page to navigate, or just click through using the "Next up:" link under the main text.

<aside> 👉 This course is built so that it can easily copied and modified by teachers wishing to customize it. For more information on creating your own custom version, see the Teacher's Notes. The Notes also contain information on Accessibility

</aside>

Next up: Lesson One: Introduction to SIFT

All Lessons
Lesson One: Introduction to SIFT Lesson Two: Investigate the Source Lesson Three: Further Investigation Lesson Four: Find Trusted Coverage Lesson Five: Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context The text and media of this site, where possible, is released into the CC BY, and free for reuse and revision. We ask people copying this course to leave this note intact, so that students and teachers can find their way back to the original (periodically updated) version if necessary. We also ask librarians and reporters to consider linking to the canonical version. As the authors of the original version have not reviewed any other copy's modifications, the text of any site not arrived at through the above link should not be sourced to the original authors.
<aside> 🏆 Development of this website concept funded in part by RTI International and the Rita Allen Foundation via the Misinformation Solutions Forum Prize. Neither organization is responsible for the content of this site.

</aside>

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In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.

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Levy_and_Ross_(forthcomming)_The_cognitive_science_of_fake_news.pdf

Levy_and_Ross_(forthcomming)_The_cognitive_science_of_fake_news.pdf

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Have you heard? Nancy Pelosi diverted Social Security money to fund the impeachment inquiry. President Trump's father was a member of the KKK.

Far-fetched as those statements sound, they were among the most shared fake news stories on Facebook in 2019, according to a report by the nonprofit organization Avaaz, which concluded that political fake news garnered more than 150 million views in 2019. And a study by Dartmouth University computer scientist Soroush Vosoughi, PhD, and colleagues found that fake news actually reaches more people and spreads more quickly than the truth (, Vol. 359, No. 6380, 2018).

And that's alarming psychologists and other behavioral researchers. "Fake news has important implications in politics, but also in areas such as health and nutrition, climate science, and financial information," says David Rand, PhD, a professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. "The basic question from a psychological perspective is: How can people possibly believe this stuff?"

A frequent explanation is motivated reasoning - the idea that people's cognitive processes are biased toward believing things that conform with their worldview. Hence, a liberal voter is predisposed to believe unsavory rumors about President Trump's father, while a conservative is more willing to accept that Rep. Pelosi would illegally divert public funds.

But research by Rand and colleagues challenges the idea that it's our reasoning that is biased. "The dominant explanation for why people believe fake news has been that their reasoning is held captive by partisan biases-their thinking gets hijacked," Rand says. His studies paint an alternate picture: "People who believe false things are the people that just don't think carefully," he says.

Time to think

Rand and Gordon Pennycook, PhD, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada, measured analytical reasoning in 3,446 American participants from Mechanical Turk. They found that higher scores on the reasoning test were associated with a better ability to distinguish fake headlines from real news headlines.

That was true even when the fake stories aligned with participants' political preferences. The authors concluded that people are more likely to fall prey to misinformation because of lazy thinking than due to any conscious or subconscious desire to protect their political identities (, Vol. 188, No. 1, 2019). In a replication study, Rand and his colleagues confirmed those results and showed the effects extend beyond blatantly false headlines to hyperpartisan headlines as well (Ross. R.M., et. al., , Published online, 2019). "People [who] believed false headlines tended to be the people [who] didn't think carefully, regardless of whether those headlines aligned with their ideology," Rand says.

An experimental study showed similar results. Rand, Pennycook and Bence Bago, PhD, at the University of Toulouse Capitole, in France, presented 1,635 American participants from Mechanical Turk with a series of news items. The stories - some true, some false - appeared as they would on social media, as screenshots that showed the headline, the source and the first few sentences of a news story. First, participants were asked to make a quick judgment about whether the news was real or fake while they were holding unrelated information about a visual pattern in their working memory. Then they saw the news item again, and could take their time mulling over the veracity of the story, with no time pressure, and no working memory load to carry. When people took time to think, they improved at discerning the truth, whether or not their political identity aligned with the news (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Published online, 2020).

The takeaway, Rand says, is that people who scroll quickly through social media might be less susceptible to misinformation if they simply slow down to consider what they're reading. "Our findings suggest that getting people to reason more is a good thing," he says. "When you're on social media, stop and think."

Rand's new findings seem to bump up against the long-established idea that we're less critical of information that reinforces our ideology or identity. Indeed, there's plenty of evidence that partisan alignment affects our judgments. In a meta-analysis of 51 experimental studies, Peter Ditto, PhD, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues found that liberals and conservatives were both likely to evaluate information more favorably when it supported their own political beliefs (Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2018).

Rand doesn't contest the idea that ideology can affect our judgment. His point: "Where ideological bias exists, this bias is typically caused by intuitive processes rather than by reasoning," he says. He acknowledges that reasoning might boost bias in situations where the misinformation is more subtle, such as climate change studies in which complicated data could be spun multiple ways. "For cases that are more ambiguous, there may be more wiggle room to convince yourself of the conclusion you are motivated to believe."

On the other hand, bias seems to have less impact on reasoning when people are evaluating fake news stories that are blatantly inaccurate. "In that case, you don't have that intellectual wiggle room. Thinking more will help you get to the right answer."

Nudging toward accuracy

Steven Sloman, PhD, a cognitive scientist at Brown University who has written about the science of fake news (Lazer, D.M.J., et. al., , Vol. 359, No. 6380, 2018), says Rand's studies on lazy thinking raise some interesting points, but more work is needed to determine whether those findings extend to the messy real world. Participants in the study were being asked to differentiate true stories from false, which may have automatically put them into a more critical, deliberative mindset, he says.

"They're in a different frame of mind than people who are just scrolling through social media or having conversations with friends." That social piece is also an important area for further study, he adds. "People aren't information processors like computers are. We're social animals, and an important function of fake news is that it's an indicator of what other people believe."

The social component is also what makes fake news such a thorny problem to solve, says Ditto. "Whether or not people believe fake news isn't just a cognitive process. It's socially reinforced," he says. You see people who think like you, all believing the same things, and offering you new information that reinforces those beliefs. "It's a team effort, and that's where fake news gets a lot of its power," he says.

But there are ways to start diffusing that power, Rand says. "Social media platforms can nudge people to think about accuracy." In another 2019 paper, he and Pennycook showed that using crowdsourcing to rank the accuracy of news on social media could be an effective way to reduce the spread of misinformation (, Vol. 116, No. 7, 2019).

Rand, who is advising Facebook on how to use crowdsourcing, says there's a lot of room for psychologists to apply their expertise. "This is an entirely psychological question, and a place where psychology has a real opportunity to make a contribution to a problem of great public interest."

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Why we fall for fake news: Hijacked thinking or laziness?

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Have you heard? Nancy Pelosi diverted Social Security money to fund the impeachment inquiry. President Trump's father was a member of the KKK. Far-fetched as those statements sound, they were among the most shared fake news stories on Facebook in 2019, according to a report by the nonprofit organization Avaaz, which concluded that political fake news garnered more than 150 million views in 2019.

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Why Do Our Brains Love Fake News? | Above the Noise | PBS LearningMedia

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Ever have an argument with someone, and no matter how many facts you provide, you just can't get that person to see it your way? One big reason for this is cognitive bias, which is a limitation in our thinking that can cause flaws in our judgement.

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Cult of Pedagogy Article with Common Sense Education 

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Cult of Pedagogy Article with Common Sense Education 

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Lessons that Build Students’ Media and News Literacy | Cult of Pedagogy

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Our students can access information in seconds, so we need to arm them with critical thinking skills and an understanding of the ethics of content creation.

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Langley High School political science teacher David Kuhn says he knows "enough to get out of the way" when teaching students in real-time about the heart-breaking events in Ukraine.

Kuhn pushed students in his fall semester political science elective to study international relations theories on post Cold War conflict and varying perspectives on whether Russia was likely to invade the former Soviet state. Now, as tanks roll through Ukraine, he's encouraging his class to process the devastating developments through the careful consumption of information.

"No teacher can read or know everything," Kuhn says of his approach to teaching a "Current Affairs" elective course in a high school less than two miles from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. "I know enough to get out of the way, making sure students have the tools to research and determine things like what do we know and how do we actually know what is true?"

Langley High teacher David Kuhn leads a "Current Affairs" class discussion on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

On Monday Feb. 28, five days after Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine, Kuhn's students are trying to assess the current state of the conflict, as well as the effectiveness of U.S. and European sanctions on Russia and its wealthy elites.

"One of the first things we did was look at the reliability of different articles," senior Katie Westerheim says. "Being able to read something, look at the news source, to make an informed opinion about whether we should trust it, these are skills we will be able to apply forward throughout our lives."

One student raises his hand to express doubts that financial sanctions are having any real impact on Russian oligarchs, saying he has read that many of Russia's wealthiest citizens have simply moved possessions like super yachts outside the reach of crackdowns by the Western nations.

"And where did you read that?," Kuhn asks. The student sheepishly slumps down in his seat and admits: "I saw some things on Twitter" as his classmates collectively groan. He quickly notes he has seen similar reports in mainstream media like Reuters and CNBC as well, highlighting the need to cite reliable sources during class discourse.

Kuhn says this kind of open and free-wheeling discussion is how he aims to run the class, pushing students to debate and learn from each other as much as they do from him or a single news source.

Langley High students study a map of post Soviet states.

"I always like to say, how do you know that?," Kuhn says. "It is a whole other thing entirely when someone can say, well because I was there - and we have students in our class who are able to offer that perspective."

Arshak Avetisyan, a Langley senior who lived in Moldova, contributes first-hand insight into long-standing tensions between Russia and post Soviet nations.

Arshak says while in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, his family usually spoke Russian with other people who knew Russian. It didn't always go over so well. A soccer club didn't want him to play when they learned he spoke Russian, an example of lingering hostility after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he says.

"Although there is no real war or shootings between them, you can still very much feel the tensions," Arshak said.

Kuhn had students study The Clash of Civilizations, an essay by American political scientist Samuel Huntington from the 1990s that predicts the biggest sources of conflict in the post Cold War world will be based on people's cultural and religious identities.

"We are taking theory in an academic sense, and seeing how it unfolds," Kuhn says, as he directs students to outline on maps at their desks where Huntington expected divisions to occur among post Soviet states and where alliances have actually fallen.

A Langley High student looks online for reliable sources on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"Learning about the theories while we live through the invasion is somewhat harrowing," freshman Jayden Lee says. "It shows you can never be done learning about current affairs."

Om Sharma, a Langley freshman, says he's grateful for the time spent studying the lead-up to the invasion.

"It's not as basic or one-sided as many of us think," Sharma says. "Many Ukrainians speak Russian, many want to side with Russia, and many want to side with America too, which is the main reason for conflict. One thing I've learned is that Russia wants to push back because it believes the West is getting too close."

And for senior Katie Westerheim, Kuhn's classroom environment is paying off at home too.

"This class has made me more knowledgeable, and more confident about participating in conversations when I hear people discussing things in complex ways," she says. "We have a lot of conversations about politics in my family. Growing up, I am used to my parents being the ones to tell me things and teach me everything about the world. I'm now having conversations where I can tell them things."

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Reliable Sources: Langley High Students Separate Fact from Fiction Amid Ukraine Conflict

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Langley High School political science teacher David Kuhn says he knows "enough to get out of the way" when teaching students in real-time about the heart-breaking events in Ukraine. Kuhn pushed students in his fall semester political science elective to study international relations theories on post Cold War conflict and varying perspectives on whether Russia was likely to invade the former Soviet state.

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MediaWise empowers people of all ages to be more critical consumers of content online by teaching key media literacy skills.

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The News Literacy Project works with educators and journalists to give students the skills they need to discern fact from fiction and to know what to trust.

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Checkology from the News Literacy Project

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Checkology from the News Literacy Project

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Checkology is a free e-learning platform with engaging, authoritative lessons on subjects like news media bias, misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and more. Learners develop the ability to identify credible information, seek out reliable sources and apply critical thinking skills to separate fact-based content from falsehoods.

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Google's Evaluate Credibility of Online Sources

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Google's Evaluate Credibility of Online Sources

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In this lesson, you will learn how to determine what makes a source credible and how to use the 5 Ws to evaluate online articles.

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.