Mike Evans knew that something needed to be done.
Evans, who was the instructor in American Government 1101 for Georgia State University 2021, had seen his students come to class with less facts and more conspiracies over the years. The days of students arriving on campus with a dim memory of civics from high school are long gone. They arrived with bold and often false beliefs, shaped by the hours they spend each day on TikTok. YouTube, and Instagram.
in a national study, more than half the teens said that a video anonymously posted provided “strong proof” of U.S. voting fraud. This video was shot in Russia. By entering some key words into your browser, you can get a sense of the context.
Ignoring online gullibility was irresponsible, if not negligent. How could this course help students become “effective, responsible participants in American Democracy” if they turned a blind-eye to digital misinformation. A major overhaul of a class that enrolls over 4,000 students per year, with 15 instructors presenting 42 sections online, in person and hybrid, would be a logistical nightmare.
Evans, a politician, then came across the Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum, which was developed by the Research Group I led at Stanford University. The curriculum is available for free to anyone and teaches a series of strategies that are based on , how fact-checkers evaluate information online.
He asked in fall 2021 if certain aspects of the curriculum could be incorporated into American Government 1100 without having to completely restructure the course?
Both my team and I agreed.
Teaching informed citizenship
Evans’ challenge wasn’t unique to his campus.
Generation Z was born between 1997-2012. Social media, especially YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, has replaced traditional news sources as the source of their information about the world . In a study of over 1,000 teenagers aged 13-18, 8 out of 10 reported that they come across conspiracy theories on their social media feeds every week. However, only 39% said they were given instruction to evaluate the claims they see there.
Our Civic Online Reasoning Program was created to fill this gap.
Digital literacy, when we first launched our program in 2018, was a catch-all term that covered everything from editing videos and uploading them to cyberbullying and the use of sexting. The “checking of credibility of sources” criteria was one of many hidden in a wish list.
Our program focused on skills that are essential for being an informed citizen. For example, “lateral-reading“, which is using the context of the Internet to assess the credibility of a claim and identify the people behind it. We taught our students to focus on the messenger rather than the message. What organizations are behind the claim and how can they be trusted? Is there a conflict of interests with the source? What is the source’s expertise or credentials?
We conducted an experiment to test our approach when teaching government to 12th grade students in Lincoln, Nebraska public schools.
Over six hours of instruction, which is two hours less than what the average teen spent online every day, students were able to find quality information at a rate nearly twice as high as a control group. It seemed like a small step to expand our program to college classrooms.
We designed six modules for a modified version of the program that was modified to fit Evans’ course. These modules could be completed asynchronously by students at their convenience, no matter what format of the course they were taking. Our modules are closely related to the course content, unlike information literacy lessons which go beyond any particular discipline.
In an executive branch unit, for example, students analyzed a video on Instagram that falsely stated President Joe Biden wished Americans would pay more at gas pumps. They watched a TikTok video about Ketanji’s Supreme Court nomination, which was posted by a left-leaning, partisan organization.
Take a look at the program.
We made videos that deconstructed tactics used in political campaigns, such as splicing and selectively editing videos, corporate-funded websites that masqueraded as grassroots efforts.
Students were also taught how to verify facts. Latitudinal Reading was the main strategy. This involved searching on the Internet to find out what other sources, more reliable ones, say about a particular organization or influencer. We also challenged assumptions, like the idea that Wikipedia was always unreliable. Not True is especially true for ” Protected Pages” indicated by the padlock icon on top of an article. This prevents editorial changes, except by established Wikipedians. A dot-org site has never passed the rigorous tests to qualify as a charity. Dot-org domains have always been “open”, meaning anyone can register them, without any questions.
The lessons were only 150 minutes long over the entire semester. Instructors didn’t have to do anything different; they simply listed them on the schedule.
Positive outcomes, modest effort
What did Evans’ American Government 1101 students think of this method?
Over two semesters of an academic year, 3,488 student took a test both at the start and at the end. The test included questions such as one where students rated a website which claimed to “represent no industry or political group”, but was actually backed fossil fuel interests.
In June, Evans and two co-authors and I , uploaded a preprint , which had not yet been peer reviewed and documented the experiment and its outcomes. From the beginning of the semester to the end, we found that students were much more adept at identifying suspect sources and confident about evaluating the source of information. The scores of students who were able do this better improved by 18%. 80% of students said that they had “learned valuable things” through the modules.
It’s not bad for a course that can be easily added to.
These results are similar to those of other studies that we have conducted. For example, one was in a college food class, and another in a introduction to rhetoric and writing. Both showed how educators could improve students’ digital skills – and their awareness about misinformation – without disrupting the curriculum.
It’s a necessary step, and I think it is. There is a chasm between the content approved for students’ reading lists, and the unregulated, unverified and unreliable online content they consume.
What’s the good news? This intervention can be used in many subjects where misinformation is rampant: politics, history, nutrition and economics. Similar findings from other colleges reinforce our confidence in this approach.
It’s not necessary to wait for a revolution before making these changes. Even small steps can make a big difference. In a world filled with misinformation and distorted facts, teaching students to distinguish between the two could be one of the most civic things we can do.
Sam Wineburg was funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation to conduct this research. He is also a member of the board for the non-profit Digital Inquiry Group, which operates the Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum.
