Fact or Fake? Helping Students Assess Credibility of Online Sources

Introduction and Rationale

On February 10, 2020 the internet was abuzz with the “Broomstick Challenge.” All across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even reputable news outlets on the local and national scale, there were pictures of people balancing brooms. Supposedly, it was possible because of a perfect planetary rotation, or phase of the moon, or positioning of Mercury and Venus in the night sky. The supposed explanation for this broomstick phenomenon has faded from most people’s working memory because the whole thing was a farce. Was it fun? Absolutely! Was it fact? Not even close. (see more on the Broomstick Hoax here)

The internet is a fantastic source of information for students; unfortunately, not all of the information online can be trusted. Teaching students to evaluate online sources is an absolute necessity, but it is a challenging task to teach relevant guidelines for source credibility that adapt alongside constantly evolving media. When teaching students of all ages to evaluate the reliability of an online source, teachers should develop easy to remember criteria and offer students opportunities to practice the skill. This blog will outline a lesson and activity that we developed to teach students about source credibility.

Erica teaches 7th grade Language Arts, but has previously taught high school also. Holly also has experience teaching 6th grade Language Arts. Erica’s 7th graders are often fooled by the appearance of a website; if it looks really professional, it must be reliable! Even her previous seniors in high school were routinely fooled into assuming credibility if the source looked/sounded good. In the article “Investigating Criteria That Seventh Graders Use to Evaluate the Quality of Online Sources,” the authors found that students can accurately determine the author with 83% accuracy, but can determine reliability with only 25%; the authors say that students trust a source if it claims credibility without engaging in fact-checking or research about the author of the source (Coiro, Coscarelli, Maykel & Forzani, 2015). This deficit demonstrates why it is important to begin teaching students about source credibility in the early grades so that they build the complex skill of critical source evaluation as they are developing other digital literacy skills.

We taught this lesson over the course of two 1-hour classes for the Digital Media Lab at Lafayette Elementary. The first class introduced the idea of source credibility and criteria to evaluate sources, but only allowed students a small amount of time to begin working on their projects. The project is a “Fake Out” activity where students find real facts about an animal and create 2 digital posters about the animal, one with real facts, and one with invented facts, to try and fake out their peers. The “Fake Outs” were also going to be on display to try and fool visiting family members at the conclusion of the course, but with the school closures for the COVID-19 Pandemic, this didn’t happen. The second hour reviewed source evaluation criteria and allowed students to finish research and complete their “Fake Out” posters. While the lesson was originally designed for 3rd-5th grade, it could be easily modified for higher grades.

Lesson Goals

The goal of this lesson is to help students understand why credibility is important, and also teach them the skills to assess source credibility. The goals can be written as “I can” statements to present to students as follows:

I can look at a source online and determine if I can trust the information.
I can use what I know about credible sources to create believable and unbelievable sources of my own

These objectives align with the following literacy and digital literacy standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.8: Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.6: Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
ISTE 3b Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility and relevance of information, media, data or other resources.
ISTE 6b Students create original works or responsibly repurpose or remix digital resources into new creations

Description of Lesson and Activities

FIRST CLASS HOUR

When teaching a lesson about source credibility, it’s fun to give the students a phony source and have them browse for about 5 minutes; it is important that they DO NOT know yet that you are doing a lesson on source credibility.

There are a lot of sources that work for this purpose. There is a great website about the terrors of dihydrogen monoxide: did you know it is found in every river, lake, and ocean on earth, and that prolonged contact can cause death!? This one is really fun because even if you tell the class to read silently, there will always be a few students that shout out, “this is insane,” or “how has no one ever told me about this before?” and sometimes you will even have the one who really paid attention in chemistry who ruins the big reveal by blurting out, “It’s just a different way of saying water.”

Another popular hoax site for practicing source credibility tells about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. The site has been around since 1998, and even though it was created as a hoax, it is fun for this activity, especially with younger students; they are more willing to believe that there may actually be cephalopods adapted to living in trees, especially when there are fun pictures to prove it. This was the site we used in our recent Digital Medial Lab lesson at Lafayette Elementary with the group that consisted of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders.

Once the students have read the assigned site for about 5 minutes, the teacher should gather the class back together and ask for reactions: What did you learn? What surprised you? From our experience teaching with this site, more than likely there will be a student that leads the discussion to the topic of truth/reality, and asks the class if they believe what they saw. There is also a possibility that students lack a firm concept of a hoax, or those that doubt the veracity of the source remain silent. In case students do not start to question reliability on their own, the teacher could ask leading questions such as, “Have any of you ever seen these on the news before? Or in a book? No? I wonder why?” The reveal can be fun. Water is found in every river, lake and ocean on Earth, AND it can kill you if you are exposed to too much. The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus may not be real, but the Pacific Northwest Octopus Tree is a real thing.

Most students will forgive you quickly for the deception. In Erica’s several years of teaching a similar lesson, she has only had a few students who have been a bit perturbed by the trick. Once you have their attention, you get to the goal of the lesson: identifying credible sources online. After the warmup, it’s time for the mini-lesson that will help students with their activity.

During the mini lesson, we taught students about the 5W criteria of source credibility. Searching online produces several checklists and acronyms to help students assess credibility. The 5 W criteria, found on the lesson Hoax or No Hoax? from ReadWriteThink, stands out because the criteria are incredibly similar to the questions students ask to determine elements of plot for narrative comprehension. Because they are already familiar with the words, it is easier for them to remember. As you introduce each criteria, have students contribute why they think it is a useful way to determine credibility and ask for any background knowledge and experience. The following is a screenshot of the slide used in the lesson at Media Lab:

After students have an understanding of the 5W criteria, have them go back and re-evaluate the site from the warmup. This step can be done as a whole class, small group, or independently depending on your classroom dynamic. At Media Lab, we talked as a whole class and discussed if the Tree Octopus website met the criteria. After looking at all of the criteria, the group was in agreement that the source was not credible.

The next step in the lesson is to begin creating the “Fake Out” Posters. We introduced the assignment and offered students the fun task of trying to fool their peers with a “fake out” poster instead of the one created using real facts from a credible source. Because of the limited amount of time for the lesson, students were given a single source for their research; National Geographic Kids offers a wide range of animals with interesting facts and articles that are an appropriate length for upper elementary students. After showing an exemplar, which was created with facts from the National Geographic site as well as images from the royalty free image bank of Pixabay, students had the remainder of our first class on source credibility to begin collecting research.

SECOND CLASS HOUR

For the second day of this lesson, we began with a warm-up briefly introducing the concept of perspective. We felt it was important to demonstrate that misinformation is not always necessarily an outright lie but can also come in the form of a partial view that misleads the reader. The warm-up consisted of showing macrophotography (super zoomed-in photos) of everyday objects and having students try to guess the object—a very tricky task in some cases! We then related this to the lesson topic of information literacy and “fake news” by discussing what happens if we only get to see a small part of the “whole picture.”

After the warm-up, we transitioned back to our “Fact or Fake” projects with a mini-lesson on how to design a “fake-out” poster that is more likely to fool the audience. Because our plan was to have parents try to guess which poster was real and which was the fake-out, this lesson focused on some elements of text and visual design that can make a source appear either credible or less so. The students were presented with two pairs of posters on the Andean bear. Each pair had one “fact” poster and one “fake” poster. First, students saw the pair below, in which the “fake-out” (poster 1) included excessive use of color, capitalization, underlining, and exclamation marks, as well as statements that were easily identifiable as false (such as listing pterodactyls and hot Cheetos as part of the animal’s diet). Students were asked to decide which they thought was the factual, credible poster and which was the “fake-out” then vote by going to the corresponding side of the room. Almost all students voted correctly for poster 2, with only a few voting for poster 1. It should be noted that those who chose poster 1 appeared to do so jokingly (giggling to each other about hot Cheetos), so it seemed that all students were able to recognize this as an unreliable source of information.

Students were then shown the second pair of posters, shown below, and vote again in the same way. In this pair, poster 1 was the “fact” poster, and poster 2 was the “fake-out”—and it was much harder to tell which was which! Almost everyone voted for poster 2 as being the credible source, probably because poster 1 included the surprising fact that Andean bears live in trees. We discussed why this poster fooled so many more people than the first one, including the kinds of facts that might surprise people, the use of text and visual elements that make a source appear professional, and how to design a tricky fake “fact” that is based in truth but not quite right. Students quickly understood how referring to these bears as fierce and dangerous predators (even though they are mostly vegetarians) is a much more believable falsehood than saying that they eat pterodactyls and hot Cheetos.

Finally, students got to work completing their own “Fact or Fake” posters. It was exciting to see them implementing the strategies they had learned. Students were eager to make their posters as “tricky” as possible: one student enthusiastically added glaring rainbow colors to his “fact” poster to make it appear fake, commenting “I’ll trick ‘em with color!” Another searched diligently for all the possible habitats of their chosen animal before writing a fake fact stating that they live on the savanna.

Scaffolds, Supports, and Challenges

Students liked the National Geographic Kids website and were able to navigate it easily because the animals were organized into clear categories, and it combined eye-catching images with clear, simple text. One thing we noticed through our observations of the whole group is that many students were going to different sites outside the pre-screened resource they were given for the project. This was something we hadn’t explicitly planned for, and we think it illustrates both pros and cons of online texts as opposed to print texts that we had not considered. With print texts, students are limited to the contents of that specific resource (or however many texts are readily available to them, for example if they are given a few books/articles on a subject). Online, however, our “digital native” students are used to the freedom and agency of instant access to innumerable sources of information. When they don’t see their favorite animal or a specific fact they want to know about their animal, of course their first instinct was to go straight to Google to seek out another source. This virtually unlimited access to information can be a powerful benefit, but it can also bring unique challenges. For example, some students were far exceeding the amount of time anticipated to complete the research activity, because they were searching for specific information rather than simply using what was available in National Geographic and moving on. As a result, tutors had to support them with conducting a quick and efficient search for credible information and with using time wisely to be able to finish their posters.

An additional challenge, which would likely emerge in any class setting, could be that some students are able to quickly, efficiently, and independently complete the assignment; other students may need much more assistance from tutors and more time to complete the task. As a teacher, you will know if your students are likely to be able to complete this task mostly independently. If you foresee that many students will need more assistance and time, perhaps this would be an opportunity for the assignment to be in teacher-assigned heterogeneous groups, which would allow students to succeed as a group.

Adaptations and Extensions

While this lesson was taught to upper elementary, Erica has implemented similar lessons in both middle school and high school successfully. The “Fake Out” Activity is ideal for upper elementary, and even middle school. An appropriate extension for middle or high school could be tied to a persuasive or argumentative writing unit and the activity could be to create one fake and one real persuasive poster and have peers engage in fact-checking to determine if the sources used were reliable.

This lesson can be fun and engaging, but the reality of misinformation online is far from fun. As soon as students learn how to use Google, they are exposed to the wealth of both reliable and unreliable sources. It is, therefore, imperative that teachers implement some version of this lesson as soon as students are using the internet for research. We also strongly suggest that this lesson, or some iteration, be repeated every year for as long as students are in school and engaging in research online. The internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet; as educators, it’s our job to help our students learn to make healthy decisions about what they put into their bodies and brains.

Sources and Links

Coiro, J., Corscarelli, C., Maykel, C., & Forzani, E. (2015). Investigating Criteria That Seventh Graders Use to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 59(3), 287-297.

Kozdras, D., and Welsh, J. (2013) Read Write Think. Hoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation.

Dihydrogen Monoxide Site: https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Site: https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

Chameleon Pics from Pixaby:

https://pixabay.com/photos/animal-chameleon-colorful-exotic-2610766

https://pixabay.com/photos/chameleon-green-terrarium-4785224/

Andean Bear picture 1, animal facts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/s/spectacled-bear/

Andean Bear picture 2: https://pixabay.com/photos/bear-spectacled-bear-zoo-enclosure-1643378/

Andean Bear picture 3: CC BY-SA 3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacled_bear#/media/File:Spectacled_Bear_Tennoji_2.jpg

Andean Bear picture 4, animal facts: https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/andean-bear