Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

With all the information they ever need right at their fingertips, it is imperative to teach students how to check their facts. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to know what is true and false, and students are struggling deciphering the truths from the falsehoods. According to Stanford University, their research “shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.”

Traditional-age students are digital natives. Professors are trained researchers. Neither of those qualities, though, prevents people from falling for misinformation online.

That’s one finding from a memorable study, released as a working paper in 2017, that documented how three groups of “experts” — among them historians and Stanford University undergraduates — evaluated online sources. Members of both groups tended to dig into a site, according to the study, by Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah McGrew, his doctoral student. The students and historians followed many of the tips that students are usually given for conducting online research, like examining a site’s domain name. But the tactics didn’t work.