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      Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

      1 , 2
      Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Background/Context

          The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. Despite mounting attention to the problem of online misinformation and growing agreement that digital literacy efforts are important, prior research offers few concrete ideas about what skilled evaluations look like.

          Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

          Our purpose in this study was to seek out those who are skilled in online evaluations in order to understand how their strategies and approaches to evaluating digital content might inform educational efforts. We sampled 45 experienced users of the Internet: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. Analysis focused on the strategies participants used to evaluate online information and arrive at judgments of credibility.

          Research Design

          In this expert/novice study, participants thought aloud as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues such as bullying, minimum wage, and teacher tenure. We analyze and present findings from three of the tasks participants completed.

          Findings/Results

          Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time.

          Conclusions/Recommendations

          We draw on insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices to examine current curricular approaches to teaching web credibility as well as to suggest alternatives.

          Related collections

          Most cited references36

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          Believe it or not: Factors influencing credibility on the Web

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            Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data

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              In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
                Teachers College Record
                SAGE Publications
                0161-4681
                1467-9620
                November 2019
                November 01 2019
                November 2019
                : 121
                : 11
                : 1-40
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Stanford University
                [2 ]University of Maryland
                Article
                10.1177/016146811912101102
                faea4f37-f385-4f89-a6bd-d2fbd3211fb0
                © 2019

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

                History

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