Abstract
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.
Highlights
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
Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course 2 strategies used by professional fact checkers (Brodsky et al, 2019; Kohnen et al, 2020; McGrew, 2020; McGrew et al, 2019; Wineburg et al, 2019; Wineburg & McGrew, 2017, 2019)
We investigated whether a curricular intervention implemented asynchronously could improve college students’ ability to evaluate the credibility of online sources
Summary
Finding 1: Students’ evaluation of online sources improved significantly after a series of courseembedded activities. This was done to gauge whether students could evaluate the credibility of Internet sources regardless of content.) The task directions informed students that they were free to “open a new tab and do an Internet search if that helps.”. 67 of 87 students engaged in lateral reading by leaving the target website (either friendsofscience.org or co2science.org, depending on the form) and consulting at least one other online source. Lateral reading—Consults at least one additional site to learn whether the target site is trustworthy (student may still not arrive at the correct conclusion)
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