Fact Vs. Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Fake News

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This book is written mainly for primary and secondary school teachers who want to teach critical thinking in their classes. Content and many examples are, therefore, tailored for the young. The principles and recommended techniques are universal, nevertheless.

Why should we know about fact vs fiction?

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. (SHEG, 2016)

Fake news works because it appeals to how our brains are wired. Fake news is a byproduct of two natural human urges: the urge to use information to influence the opinion of others and the urge to have our own opinions proven correct by the information we consume.

Being biased doesn’t make you, or anyone, abad person or a bad educator. However, failing to acknowledge those biases and how they affect the way we evaluate information puts us at a disadvantage when trying to arm students with effective media literacy skills

How the young judge credibility, the worrying trend…

The survey revealed that about half of Snapchat users who report following news media or journalists on the app see having a Snapchat account as helping that media outlets’ or journalists’ credibility. In other words, having a Snapchat account was viewed as a sort of endorsement. If Snapchat users can follow a reporter on the app, they are more likely to trust that journalist’s or media outlet’s news stories, compared to stories from a person or that entity does not have an account (Stroud & Gomez, 2017).

Navigate online information in info graphic

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The authors elaborate more on click bait

Although these tactics evolve, we need to hone our nonsense detectors such that we become naturally suspicious whenever we see: 

    • Sensationalist headlines

    • Vague or incomplete statistics

    • Reporting that seeks to stoke emotion

    • Images that appear gratuitous or that don’t make sense in context

There’s no simple answer. The authors outline their reasons…

We’re not convinced that a foolproof system of determining source credibility ever existed. Because news stories have never been simply real or fake, no pneumonic device or clever four-step solution for spotting fake news will ever prove infallible against the plethora of ways information can be manipulated to further an agenda or simply perpetrate a hoax.

We can no longer point to any source and guarantee that its information is 100% accurate and without bias. We must teach our students to deconstruct media, in all its forms, and to uncover any underlying messaging

The authors recommend CRAAP Test (an acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose), created in 2010 by the Meriam Library of California State University, Chico, California, to evaluate trustworthiness of online info. 

Currency: the timeliness of the information

    • When was the information published or posted?

    • Has the information been revised or updated?

    • Is the information current or out-of date for your topic?

    • Are the links functional?

Relevance: the importance of the information for your needs

    • Does the information relate to your topic or answer your question?

    • Who is the intended audience?

    • Is the information at an appropriate level (i.e. not too elementary or advanced for your needs)?

    • Have you looked at a variety of sources before determining this is one you will use?

    • Would you be comfortable using this source for a research paper?

Authority: the source of the information…(further details can be found at https://craaptest.net/) 

The test may seem a bit rigid at the outset, but if we don’t think of the results of this test as a definitive answer, but a stepping stone or a guideline for beginners to evaluate sources of online information, this is a good guiding principles.

Recommended steps in navigating online info

1. Purposeful search: Using advanced search techniques to narrow the scope and raise the quality of information found on the Web. 

    • The necessity of triangulation. The very best way to know if a story is true is to determine where it came from, and then to look for other credible resources that back it up.

2. Effective organization and collaboration: Being able to organize all of this information into a comprehensive and growing library of personal knowledge. 

3. Sharing and making sense of information: Sharing what we find and what we learn with the world, and using the knowledge of others to help us make more sense of it all.

    • Authority in authorship. Because so much of what we consume as news comes to us from social media, it’s tempting to trust that because our Uncle Frank or our best friend posted something, it must be true. We have to help our students recognize that authority must be found in the originator of the content, not the individual who shared it

To scrutinize first and share second (if at all)

Chankhrit Sathorn