Teaching Students to Navigate the Online Landscape

Since the 2016 presidential election, worries about our ability to evaluate online content have elicited much hand wringing. As a Forbes headline cautioned, "Americans Believe They Can Detect Fake News. Studies Show They Can't." Our own research doubtless contributed to the collective anxiety. As part of ongoing work at the Stanford History Education Group, we created dozens of assessments to gauge middle school, high school, and college students' ability to evaluate online content. In November 2016, we released a report summarizing trends in the 7,804 student responses we collected across 12 states. At all grade levels, students struggled to make even the most basic evaluations. Middle school students could not distinguish between news articles and sponsored content. High school students were unable to identify verified social media accounts. Even college students could not determine the organization behind a supposedly non-partisan website. In short, we found young people ill equipped to make sense of the information that floods their phones, tablets, and laptops.