Stanford History Report

Title: EVALUATING INFORMATION: THE CORNERSTONE OF CIVIC ONLINE REASONING

Publication Date: November 22, 2016

Links: Full Report / Announcement article

A study by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education about middle, high school, and college students' civic online reasoning.

The researchers designed a series of exercises intended to establish a performance bar for students' media literacy. Initially worried that the tasks would be too easy, the students ended up performing so far below the baseline that the researchers were taken aback. They hope that their work can be used as an assessment for learning as well as a tool for classroom instruction.

Main findings:

• Native Advertising
  • middle school students were shown the homepage of Slate magazine and asked to categorize ads vs real articles.
  • More than 80% of middle school students believed that the native advertisement, identified by the words “sponsored content,” was a real news story, implying that they didn’t understand what ‘sponsored content’ meant
• Evaluating Evidence
  • high school students were shown a picture of deformed flowers on an Imgur site and asked whether the post "provide[s] strong evidence about the conditions near the Fukushima"
  • 40% of high school students considered a picture from Imgur to be ‘strong evidence’ of the conditions of Fukushima, without questioning where the information was coming from
• Claims on Social Media
  • undergraduates were shown a tweet from MoveOn.org referencing a poll by the Center for American Progress about gun owners
  • only a few students noted that the poll was done by a professional polling org, and less than a third mentioned the political agendas of the organizations. Overall they did not seem to be thinking about the motivations behind the tweet