Abstract
College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information. Lateral reading requires users to leave the information (website) to find out whether someone has already fact-checked the claim, identify the original source, or learn more about the individuals or organizations making the claim. Instructor-matched sections of a general education civics course implemented the DPI curriculum (N = 136 students) or provided business-as-usual civics instruction (N = 94 students). At posttest, students in DPI sections were more likely to use lateral reading to fact-check and correctly evaluate the trustworthiness of information than controls. Aligning with the DPI’s emphasis on using Wikipedia to investigate sources, students in DPI sections reported greater use of Wikipedia at posttest than controls, but did not differ significantly in their trust of Wikipedia. In DPI sections, students who failed to read laterally at posttest reported higher trust of Wikipedia at pretest than students who read at least one problem laterally. Responsiveness to the curriculum was also linked to numbers of online assignments attempted, but unrelated to pretest media literacy knowledge, use of lateral reading, or self-reported use of lateral reading. Further research is needed to determine whether improvements in lateral reading are maintained over time and to explore other factors that might distinguish students whose skills improved after instruction from non-responders.
Highlights
Young adults and individuals with at least some college education are the highest Internet users in the USA (Pew Research Center, 2019a)
The current study reports findings from one of eleven colleges and universities participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort by the American Democracy Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to teach college students information-verification strategies that rely on lateral reading for online research (American Democracy Project, n.d; Caulfield, 2017a)
Our findings indicate that the DPI curriculum increased students’ use of lateral reading to draw accurate assessments of the trustworthiness of online information
Summary
Young adults (ages 18–29 years) and individuals with at least some college education are the highest Internet users in the USA (Pew Research Center, 2019a). These groups are most likely to use at least one social media site (Pew Research Center, 2019b). Despite their heavy Internet and social media use, college students rarely “read laterally” to evaluate the quality of the information they encounter online (McGrew et al, 2018).
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