Fighting ‘Fake News’ in the Classroom

I don’t follow the Atlantic, but one of their writers, Alia Wong, has a very interesting article up in the Education Writers Association site about the problems of teaching school kids about fake news.

Unfortunately, Wong’s article makes a lot of sense.

Wong begins by posing a very interesting question:

“During and after the 2016 presidential campaign, questions arose about whether shortcomings in civics instruction had exacerbated polarization in the electorate and influenced the election’s outcome. The questions on civics education were soon accompanied by a related one: What if schools are contributing to a breakdown in democracy by failing to ensure kids are media literate?”

The article then answers that question, expressing concern that a recent study by the Stanford History Education Group found that students identified a web site “as a credible source of information — even though the website is maintained by a lobbying firm for the food and beverage industry.”

The article additionally laments that students decided one news article was more credible that another solely because the first article had an “attractive infographic.”

The Atlantic’s writer also points out that “media illiteracy is in large part symptomatic of a systemic flaw: schools’ failure to instill these skills amid an increasingly convoluted world of information.”

This reminded me of another kids-believe-all-sorts-of-stuff-on-the-web study that I learned about years ago regarding the fictitious “tree octopus.” Kids were directed to a bogus web site that had been created to fool them and then wouldn’t believe this fabrication didn’t exist even after researchers explained the web site was a plant created to test student credibility about anything found online.

Back in the present, the worry may be about fake news and our kids’ ability to detect it, but Wong’s take on the issue sounds all too much like solid – and scary – news to me.