Joel Breakstone (standing) addresses social studies teachers about incorporating online reasoning skills in U.S. history classes. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOEL BREAKSTONE

Because young people have grown up with digital devices, it’s easy to assume they can evaluate the torrent of information that floods the screens of those devices. As an October 2020 Politico article declared, “To be sure, Gen Z does not need lessons on how to use the internet. . . . They aren’t falling for the same fake news stories that may have duped their parents in 2016.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. In a study published in November 2021 in Educational Researcher, the Stanford History Education Group asked more than 3,000 high school students to evaluate a series of online sources. The students, who reflected the demographic makeup of our nation’s high schools, struggled to perform even basic evaluations.

Two-thirds could not distinguish between news stories and sponsored content on a popular news website. More than half maintained that a Facebook video claiming to show ballot stuffing in the 2016 Democratic primaries constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud in the U.S. Only three students in 3,119 identified that the video was shot in Russia, a fact that could be confirmed through a simple web search that returned articles about the video from Snopes and the BBC.

This study is not an indictment of students. Instead, it’s a reflection of our educational system. Students haven’t been prepared for today’s digital environment. None of us have been.

Online Reasoning

Civic engagement in this digital age requires us to wade through a deluge of online information and make decisions about what information to trust. As recent events have revealed, public health and the health of our democracy depend on those decisions. Students — and the rest of us — need research-tested strategies to sort fact from fiction online.

What are those strategies? To answer that question, we turned to fact checkers from leading news outlets who verify information for a living. We watched these professionals as they searched online. Compared to the college students and professors in our study, fact checkers evaluated internet sources more quickly and accurately. While students and professors often scrolled up and down on the original site and carefully analyzed its contents or appearance, the fact checkers almost immediately left the site.

The fact checkers did something we call lateral reading: They opened new tabs in their browsers and searched outside the original site for information about the source. By consulting these other sources, the fact checkers learned more about who was behind the original source and whether it should be trusted. Their approach revealed a set of evaluation strategies to make efficient, accurate judgments online.

In collaboration with colleagues at the Stanford History Education Group, we designed a curriculum to help students learn strategies, like lateral reading, needed for civic engagement in a digital age. The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum provides free, classroom-ready lessons and assessments that engage students in evaluating sources that range from Instagram posts to corporate-funded websites masquerading as independent think tanks.

Curriculum materials are useful only if they improve student learning. After piloting our lessons and assessments with thousands of students and teachers across the country, we conducted the first districtwide evaluation of a digital literacy curriculum in a large, urban school district in the Midwest.

Half of the district’s 12th-grade government teachers added six civic online reasoning lessons to their curriculum. Compared to students in regular government classes, students in civic online reasoning classes grew significantly in their ability to read laterally. Fewer than six hours of instruction, which Common Sense Media reports is a shorter amount of time than a typical American teenager spends online in a single day, helped these students more effectively judge online content.

This study adds to a growing body of research in settings ranging from middle school through college that shows that instruction focused on teaching students research-backed strategies can help them make better decisions about what to trust online.

Bringing to Scale

If we are to adequately prepare students for civic life, we cannot relegate digital literacy to a single course or workshop. The scale of the problem posed by toxic digital content, and the aspects of society touched by it, demand that such lessons be woven into the fabric of the curriculum across courses and grade levels. Although students can learn the basics of lateral reading in a short amount of time, our research suggests that students need varied opportunities to practice these skills to become proficient.

We now face the educational challenge of integrating civic online reasoning instruction into existing curricula. In the two years since our curriculum launched, educators have downloaded more than 225,000 free civic online reasoning lessons and assessments from cor.stanford.edu. Teachers and administrators have begun to identify strategies for integrating these resources in their particular contexts.

In the Indian Prairie School District in Naperville, Ill., 9th-grade teachers at Neuqua Valley High School have adapted civic online reasoning lessons for use in geography and biology classes. Teachers worked with the school librarian to adapt civic online reasoning lessons to incorporate content they already were planning to cover.

Joel Breakstone (standing) oversees media literacy programs as director of the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOEL BREAKSTONE

For example, students were introduced to lateral reading as part of an introductory biology unit about caffeine in which they evaluated an article from foodinsight.org that detailed the benefits of caffeine consumption. A simple search revealed that the organization behind the site, International Food Information Council, works on behalf of beverage corporations, which have vested interests in portraying caffeine positively.

In geography class, students practiced lateral reading by investigating a viral video critiquing the U.S. handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that actually was produced by a state-run Chinese news agency. Later in the year, as part of a biology unit on nutrition, students considered what makes a social media post trustworthy by investigating TikTokers making videos about nutrition.

Teachers used common language to teach lateral reading throughout the year and regularly referenced what students had learned about the strategy in their other classes.

Districts also have focused on vertical alignment. Administrators in Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Neb., have sought to infuse civic online reasoning instruction across grade levels. This initiative began after the district provided every student with a laptop.

As social studies curriculum specialist Jaclyn Kellison explains, “With the amount of misinformation circulating on the web, we knew we needed to focus on teaching skills of media literacy in social studies classes as part of our district’s overall focus on digital citizenship. We believe that civic online reasoning is central to our mission in social studies: create informed and engaged citizens.”

The Lincoln schools integrated civic online reasoning into their district blueprint for K-12 social studies to ensure students learn these skills. Students first learn about evaluating online sources in 7th-grade social studies. The skills are taught again in 9th-grade civics and 12th-grade government while other social studies classes provide students with opportunities to practice. The district now is designing new common social studies assessments that will incorporate these skills.

Potential Payoffs

Integrating digital literacy into the curriculum is a significant undertaking. It will require planning, curriculum development and teacher professional development. (See related story.)

However, the potential payoff in the form of digitally literate students is equally clear. As Lincoln’s assessment specialist Rob McEntarffer notes, “These are some of the most important thinking skills future voters can develop.”

JOEL BREAKSTONE is the director of the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University. Twitter: @joelbreakstone. SARAH MCGREW is an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland.