Teens and Health Fake News Study

 A new study has found that teenagers have a hard time discerning between fake and true health messages. Only 48% of the participants trusted accurate health messages more than fake ones. Meanwhile, 41% considered fake and true neutral messages equally trustworthy and 11% considered true neutral health messages less trustworthy than fake health messages.

“Superlatives, clickbaits, appeals to authority, poor grammar, or boldface: Is editorial style related to the credibility of online health messages?” by Radomír Masaryk et al. Frontiers in Psychology

Student Media Literacy Research

A nationwide sampling of high school students were assessed for their ability to evaluate digital sources on the open internet. Nearly all students floundered. Ninety percent received no credit on four of six tasks. Some of the specific findings follow: 

• Fifty-two percent of students believed a grainy video claiming to show ballot stuffing in the 2016 Democratic primaries (the video was actually shot in Russia) constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud in the U.S. Among more than 3,000 responses, only three students tracked down the source of the video, even though a quick search turns up a variety of articles exposing the ruse. 
• Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and ads (set off by the words “Sponsored Content”) on Slate’s homepage.
• Ninety-six percent of students did not consider why ties between a climate change website and the fossil fuel industry might lessen that website’s credibility. Instead of investigating who was behind the site, students focused on superficial markers of credibility: the site’s aesthetics, its top-level domain, or how it portrayed itself on the About page.

Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford History Education Group & Gibson Consulting. https://purl.stanford.edu/gf151tb4868

Fake News and K-12 Information Literacy

An 18-month study shows that students all the way to college age are not recognizing the basics of evaluating a source. Especially as students are looking more and more to social media for their daily news, they may mix satire and "hard" news. The new ACRL information literacy framework reflects the importance of ascertaining the nature of news with its lens that "Authority Is Constructed and Contextual."
Stanford History Education Group. (2016).  Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University.
http://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf 

Website evaluation study

In responding to a survey about web-based information evaluation, students indicated they already find several criteria to be important when evaluating information. Instruction should address student opinions and misconceptions about Web-based information in the context of their school assignments or other information needs. For example, students may be more motivated to learn about and apply evaluative criteria that are generated through discussion with their peers. Students may also be more receptive to expanding information evaluation criteria when they are researching topics they find interesting or important. Finally, the researchers recommend that instruction should take into account the context or situations in which various evaluation criteria may be most important.
Pickard, A. J., Shenton, A. K., & Johnson, A. (2014). Young people and the evaluation of information on the World Wide Web: Principles, practice and beliefs. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 46(1), 3-20.
https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/26019
 

News evaluation study

A new study shows that trust and reliability in news can be broken down into specific factors, such as accuracy, timeliness and clarity. The study also finds that in the digital age, several new factors largely unexamined before—such as the intrusiveness of ads, navigability, load times and having the latest details—also are critical in determining whether consumers consider a publisher competent and worthy of trust.
Media Insight Project. (2016). What makes people trust news? Arlington, VA: American Press Institute. 
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/trust-news/