Learning to evaluate: An intervention in civic online reasoning

Students turn to the Internet for information but often struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of what they find. Teachers should help students develop effective evaluation strategies in order to ensure that students have access to reliable information on which to base decisions. This study reports on the results of an attempt to teach students to reason about online information. Students were taught strategies for evaluating digital content that were based on the practices of professional fact checkers. Eight lessons were devoted to teaching students strategies to effectively evaluate digital content. Pre- and posttests, each composed of four brief, constructed-response items, were administered to 68 11th-grade students who participated in the study. Students’ scores improved significantly from pre-to posttest on three of the four tasks: students demonstrated an improved ability to investigate the source of a website, critique evidence, and locate reliable sources during an open Internet search. These results are promising and suggest that explicit instruction on fact-checking strategies may help students develop more effective online evaluation strategies.