Arming students against bad information

All consumers of information must be able to distinguish fact from opinion and recognize any bias, including one’s own, that may influence the quality or depth of understanding what we are reading or hearing. For this reason, these skills are staples of the language arts and social studies curricula. Yet, with new forms of misinformation emerging, parents, educators, and policy makers are asking: Do current school curricula and teaching provide an adequate defense against the onslaught of misleading, unsubstantiated, or fake news?

Encountering unreliable or just plain false information, and even having it affect the national political agenda, is not a new phenomenon (e.g., consider the yellow journalism of the late 1880s). Historians point out that fake news, a recent term for fictitious claims and “evidence” designed intentionally to mislead, can be documented as early as the first printing press. So why does it seem so alarming now?

First, communications are more rapid, more instantly available to more people, and less and less filtered. Additionally and unfortunately, more misinformation crafted for malicious or nefarious reasons is making its way onto social media sites and into public discourse. A recent study at Stanford University found that young people’s abilities to reason about information found on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak (Stanford History Education Group, 2016). While “digital natives” are able to move between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a “selfie” and texting a friend, when it comes to evaluating information on social media channels, they are easily duped.