How Can Students Be Taught to Detect Fake News and Dubious Claims?

Roger Bolt Photography

When a Stanford University report last month proclaimed that many students could not detect fake or misleading information online, the findings caused a stir.

From January 2015 to June 2016, the researchers gave thousands of students, from middle school to college, tasks to see how adept they were at assessing the credibility of such information. Could they tell a native advertisement from a news article? Identify a partisan website as biased? Tell a verified social-media account from an unauthenticated one?

The researchers summarized their conclusions with a discouraging word: “bleak.”

“Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there,” said Sam Wineburg, the lead author of the report and director of the Stanford History Education Group, in a written statement. “Our work shows the opposite to be true.”

The findings left some people in higher education to wonder about how they could improve students’ skills, especially in the wake of the presidential-election campaign, when concerns about the influence of fake and hyperpartisan news have captured public attention.

The issue “has caused all kinds of conversations on our campus,” said Troy Swanson, department chair of library services at Moraine Valley Community College, in Illinois. Faculty members and librarians there, he said, are asking: “Where do we talk about this in our curriculum?”

The answer isn’t always clear. For many academics, the closest proxy to this set of skills falls under an umbrella known as information literacy — or the ability to find, evaluate, and use information. It’s been taught in colleges for decades, and is often spearheaded by librarians or English-composition professors. Their first task may simply be to familiarize students with databases such as JSTOR, the journal archive, and other campus resources. But the heavier lift, arguably, is teaching them to cast a critical eye on what they read.

A ‘Small Compass’

Such a challenge can be especially difficult when the internet has given students more material to wrestle with than ever before. It introduced a “seismic change” from information scarcity to abundance, said Alison Head, the founder and executive director of a national series of studies called Project Information Literacy. Despite the explosion of information, she said, students navigate that landscape “with a small compass” and often fall back on the same trusted sources.

Algorithms that can prune dissenting views out of users’ social-media streams pose another hurdle. Often billed as a convenience to users, such algorithms can produce what popular culture calls an “echo chamber,” and the idea was often repeated in discussions about the presidential election.

Mr. Wineburg said navigating the landscape of information online actually requires a new and discrete set of skills. He and others assert that the term “information literacy” itself is so broad it can be unclear what exactly it means.

The Stanford researchers called the needed skill set “civic online reasoning,” in recognition of its importance beyond the classroom. Mr. Wineburg said it should be taught as soon as young people get their hands on smartphones. As drivers must get licenses, so too should consumers of information online be taught how to assess its credibility.

Colleges define the needed skills “in their own ways,” said Melissa Bowles-Terry, the head of educational initiatives for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’s libraries. Not everyone may use the term “information literacy,” she said, “but it’s all pretty similar. I think it all comes down to finding and using information effectively to be a lifelong learner, a good citizen.”

There are many challenges to teaching those skills at the college level. Lack of time and lack of money are just a few. Librarians alone don’t have the manpower to bring every student on a campus up to par, some faculty members said. And professors have their own curricula to teach — how much time should they divert away from economics or chemistry or art history?

Educators may also overestimate their students’ ability to navigate the online terrain, Mr. Wineburg said. “We’ve confused fluency with intelligence. It’s true, our students are digital natives,” he said. “But being a native often means you are clueless about the larger structures that determine your behavior.”

A ‘Collective Enterprise’

Traditionally, many campuses have used a one-shot method of teaching information literacy, in which students receive an hourlong tutorial from librarians on finding academic sources. Some colleges now embed librarians in classes to collaborate with professors on research assignments or to provide long-term guidance to students.

Rather than farming out information literacy to librarians, teaching it should be a “collective enterprise,” said Richard S. Fogarty, associate dean of general education at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York. Undergraduate majors there have incorporated information literacy into their courses for several years. Because the skills aren’t housed in just one course, students can’t just check a box and say, “OK, now I’m information-literate,” Mr. Fogarty said.

Individual professors, too, have tried to build information- or digital-literacy exercises into their classes. Some give students external cues to look for, like a ".edu” web address. But the evolving nature of the internet can make it difficult to write a road map to find accurate sources there. The web, some professors say, has exhibited a Whac-a-Mole-like ability to create new and more clever ways to obfuscate.

“I’m not kidding when I say I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up with the internet,” said Kathryn Topper, an associate professor of classics at the University of Washington.

For the last couple of years, Ms. Topper has had her students analyze news coverage of an archaeological discovery, paying attention to questions like what people are quoted in an article and what their credentials are. Though Ms. Topper has been impressed by the scrutiny her students give each article, she said information literacy remains a labor-intensive set of skills to teach.

Campuses, she said, will have to “either put our money where our mouths are and follow through on this, or accept that our students are not going to be as information- and media-literate as we believe they should be.”