Adolescents Struggle to Identify Fake News

Given the multitude of phony news stories spawned during the 2016 election, culminating in the shooting at a D.C. pizza restaurant, the Stanford History Education Group’s study of adolescents’ ability to judge the credibility of all the information vying for their attention in cyberspace is amazingly timely. The study focused on over 7,800 middle school, high school and college students to determine their capacity for identifying bias, for separating truth from fiction or even for discriminating between an advertisement and a legitimate news story. The Group concluded that “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”

Here are two links that are worth visiting:

Read the executive summary of Stanford History Education Group’s study, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning.

Visit the Education Group’s website and look at the curriculum for “Reading Like a Historian.”