A new national study shows a woeful inability by high schoolers to detect fake news on the internet.
The research suggests an urgent need for schools to integrate new tools and curriculum into classrooms that boost students’ digital skills, the study’s authors say.
In the largest such study undertaken, researchers from Stanford Graduate School of Education devised a challenge for 3,446 American high school students who had been carefully selected to match the demographic makeup of the American population.
Rather than conduct a standard survey, in which students would self-report their media habits and skills, the research team came up with a series of live internet tasks.
The results in the journal Educational Researcher highlight what the researchers say is an urgent need to better prepare students for the realities of a world filled with a continual flow of misleading information.
“This study is not an indictment of the students—they did what they’ve been taught to do—but the study should be troubling to anyone who cares about the future of democracy,” says Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford University History Education Group and the study’s lead author. “We have to train students to be better consumers of information.”
In one of the study’s tasks, researchers showed students an anonymously produced video that circulated on Facebook in 2016 claiming to show ballot stuffing during Democratic primary elections and asked them to use internet-enabled computers to determine whether it provided strong evidence of voter fraud.
Students tried, mostly in vain, to discover the truth. Despite access to the i ..
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