Hello colleagues, Welcome to summer! It's June!
Given the flood of information we are all surrounded by every day, It is often hard to know for sure what is actually credible. For some time, I've been wondering what we could do as teachers to support learners to effectively evaluate the information they read and see online.
I just came across a useful article by Yuki Terada on the topic of teaching information literacy. Research conducted this year by Sam Wineburg and his colleagues at Stanford University discovered that students who were taught to "read laterally" --instead of reading linearly-- were significantly more successful in identifying credible information than students who were not. Reading laterally is what professional fact checkers do.
The researchers suggest that teachers should adapt the ways we teach information literacy to support learners to read laterally -- in effect, to read more like fact checkers. Reading laterally can enhance critical thinking skills to help all of us to more effectively evaluate online information.
Here are some tips for teaching lateral reading offered by Tarada:
- "Guide students with probing questions
- It’s OK to use Wikipedia
- Work on productive skimming
- Don’t be fooled by [a website's professional] appearances
- Create a list of go-to sources"
There are more tips available at Stanford University's Civic Online Reasoning site.
And here's a link to a 4-min. video clip demonstrating a lesson on lateral reading.
Please let us know your thoughts and questions about teaching media literacy.
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP