From NEA Today: Students Still Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction on the Internet
EDITOR'S NOTE: It's not just students who get fact and fiction fouled up on the Internet.
By TIM WALKER
Critical thinking skills have always been high on most educators’ wish-list for their students. The onslaught of disinformation across the Internet, however, has only heightened the sense of urgency.
After the 2016 presidential election, during which the term “fake news” entered the lexicon, researchers at Stanford University released a study that examined U.S. high school students’ troubling inability to discern fact from fiction in online news sources.
“Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true,” Professor Sam Wineburg, the lead author of the report and founder of the Stanford History Education Group, commented after the report’s release.