Helping citizens read less and learn more

Abstract

Speaker – Sarah McGrew, University of Maryland Citizens increasingly turn to the Internet for information on political, social, and health issues. Many of the same features that make the Internet a powerful source of information—its abundance of diverse sources and relative lack of gatekeepers—make it possible for questionable sources, misinformation, and patently fake news to prosper. In this seminar, Sarah McGrew will use data from several years of assessment development and curriculum testing to argue that innovations are necessary in civic education to combat the spread of digital mis- and disinformation. First, she will share findings from a study of how professional fact-checkers, historians, and students evaluated online information, conceptualizing fact-checkers’ skilled approaches and contrasting their strategies with students’ typical approaches. Next, McGrew will explore how we might teach these effective evaluative approaches to students in the context of civic education, outlining a curricular approach and describing students’ progress with findings from a series of intervention studies. Being able to find reliable online sources is a critical civic skill and teaching students to evaluate digital content should be a key component of citizenship education in the digital age.