How can you tell what's credible and what isn't? This needs to be taught, effectively and without bias. But how? The audience is ... middle- and high-schoolers. College students. Even adults!
I'm gathering the best articles and lesson plans and adding them to a guide I created:
It includes resources for evaluating news sources (I love you, AllSides.com!), lesson plans, and fact-checking websites. I'm tweaking a great checklist on evaluating news sites based on Evaluating news sites: Credible or Clickbait? by Candice Benjes-Small. Sooner or later, I'm going to add my favorite articles on the topic.
For now, I'll list some of them here:
- Knight Foundation. "How Youth Navigate the News Landscape." 2017, https://www.knightfoundation.org/reports/how-youth-navigate-the-news-landscape.
- Ostenson, Jonathan. "Reconsidering the Checklist in Teaching Internet Source Evaluation." portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 14, 2014, pp. 33-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2013.0045.
- Valenza, Joyce. "Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: A News Literacy Toolkit for a “Post-Truth” World." School Library Journal. 2016, http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/.
- Wineburg, Sam et al. "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning." Stanford History Education Group, 2016, http://purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt593
I've been pondering this quite a bit lately and am speaking on the topic of teaching news literacy to a few different audiences. First to the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association advisors, then to a group of SILS and MEJO students at UNC on March 31, and to the Society or Professional Journalists Region 2 conference April 8 at Elon University.
Do you have a favorite resource for teaching how to evaluate news credibility? Do share!
