Can middle schoolers learn to read the web like experts? Possibilities and limits of a strategy-based intervention

Kohnen, Angela M.; Mertens, Gillian E.; Boehm, Shelby

doi:10.23860/jmle-2020-12-2-6

Cited by 34 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…Our findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that shows that students can improve their online reasoning by learning a few easy-to-apply heuristics drawn from research with professional fact checkers. Positive results have accrued across age levels: middle school (Kohnen et al, 2020), high school (Axelsson et al, 2021; McGrew, 2020; Pavlounis et al, 2021), college (Breakstone, Smith, Connors, et al, 2021; Brodsky, Brooks, Scimeca, Galati, et al, 2021; Brodsky, Brooks, Scimeca, Todorova, et al, 2021; McGrew et al, 2019), and adulthood (Panizza et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes.

Wineburg¹,

Breakstone²,

McGrew³

et al. 2022

Journal of Educational Psychology

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In a study conducted across an urban school district, we tested a classroom-based intervention in which students were taught online evaluation strategies drawn from research with professional fact checkers. Students practiced the heuristic of lateral reading: leaving an unfamiliar website to search the open Web before investing attention in the site at hand. Professional development was provided to high school teachers who then implemented six 50-minute lessons in a district-mandated government course. Using a matched control design, students in treatment classrooms (n = 271) were compared to peers (n = 228) in regular classrooms. A multilevel linear mixed model showed that students in experimental classrooms grew significantly in their ability to judge the credibility of digital content. These findings inform efforts to prepare young people to make wise decisions about the information that darts across their screens.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes.

Wineburg¹,

Breakstone²,

McGrew³

et al. 2022

Journal of Educational Psychology

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show abstract

“…A much greater investment in research and development is needed to prepare students to navigate treacherous digital terrain. Small-scale but promising studies suggest that it is possible to improve students' digital savvy (Breakstone et al, 2021;Brodsky et al, 2019;Kohnen et al, 2020;McGrew, 2020;McGrew et al, 2019). Given the threat to civic and public health posed by digital illiteracy, these preliminary interventions need to be taken up at scale to identify approaches that can be widely adopted.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait

Breakstone

Wineburg

Rapaport³

et al. 2021

Educational Researcher

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Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.

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“…Their strategies guided our development of curriculum for evaluating online sources. To date, interventions based on fact checkers' strategies have yielded promising results across a wide age span: middle school (Kohnen et al, 2020), high school (McGrew, 2020;, and college (Brodsky et al, 2019;Fielding, 2019;McGrew et al, 2019;Supiano, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• Prior interventions have shown that middle school, high school, and college students can become more skilled evaluators of digital content through in-person instruction when taught strategies used by professional fact checkers (Brodsky et al, 2019;Kohnen et al, 2020;McGrew, 2020;McGrew et al, 2019;Wineburg & McGrew, 2017. This study tested whether these strategies could be taught in an asynchronous college course.…”

Section: Essay Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course

et al. 2021

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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced college students to spend more time online. Yet many studies show that college students struggle to discern fact from fiction on the Internet. A small body of research suggests that students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging the credibility of online sources. But what about asynchronous remote instruction? In an asynchronous college nutri-tion course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet web-sites using fact checkers’ strategies. Chief among these strategies was lateral reading, the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site. Students im-proved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post interven-tion. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.

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Can middle schoolers learn to read the web like experts? Possibilities and limits of a strategy-based intervention

Abstract: Can middle schoolers learn to read the web like experts? Possibilities and limits of a strategy-based intervention.

Cited by 34 publications

References 25 publications

Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes.

Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes.

Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait

Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course

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