Perceived Classroom Practices, Critical Thinking, and Fake-News Detection and Sharing: A Structural Equation Modeling Study

Social media has increased students’ exposure to fake news, making critical thinking instruction important for responsible information use. However, limited evidence explains how specific classroom practices are related to students’ critical thinking skills and, in turn, their fake-news detection and sharing. This quantitative study examined whether three classroom practices—encouraging student explanation and justification, promoting collaborative problem solving, and encouraging reflection and self-assessment—were associated with three critical thinking subskills: gathering information and supporting a position, planning and organizing information, and openness to different ideas. The study also examined how these subskills were related to self-reported fake-news detection skills and the tendency to share fake news. Data were collected through a paper-based survey of 320 undergraduates in northern Taiwan. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the measurement model, and structural equation modeling was used to test direct and bootstrapped indirect effects. The results showed that promoting collaborative problem solving was the classroom practice most consistently associated with critical thinking skills, although encouraging reflection and self-assessment showed the strongest association with planning and organizing information. Gathering information and supporting a position was most strongly related to self-reported fake-news detection skills. Self-reported fake-news detection skills and planning and organizing information were positively related to the tendency to share fake news, whereas openness to different ideas was negatively related to this tendency. These findings suggest that structured collaboration and reflection should be paired with credibility-checking criteria and performance-based detection tasks to help students evaluate and share online information more responsibly.