Background Info on "Reading Laterally" from Stanford History Education Group - Group 2
Background Info from Stanford History Education Group to Prepare for our on "Reading Laterally" Activity
Stanford scholars observe 'experts' to see how they evaluate the credibility of information online
A new report from the Stanford History Education Group finds that fact checkers read less but learn more – far outpacing historians and top college students.
BY CARRIE SPECTOR
How do expert researchers go about assessing the credibility of information on the internet? Not as skillfully as you might guess – and those who are most effective use a tactic that others tend to overlook, according to scholars at Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Sam Wineburg (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)
A new report released recently by the Stanford History Education Group(SHEG) shows how three different groups of “expert” readers – fact checkers, historians and Stanford undergraduates – fared when tasked with evaluating information online.
The fact checkers proved to be fastest and most accurate, while historians and students were easily deceived by unreliable sources.
“Historians sleuth for a living,” said Professor Sam Wineburg, founder of SHEG, who co-authored the report with doctoral student Sarah McGrew. “Evaluating sources is absolutely essential to their professional practice. And Stanford students are our digital future. We expected them to be experts.”
The report’s authors identify an approach to online scrutiny that fact checkers used consistently but historians and college students did not: The fact checkers read laterally, meaning they would quickly scan a website in question but then open a series of additional browser tabs, seeking context and perspective from other sites.
In contrast, the authors write, historians and students read vertically, meaning they would stay within the original website in question to evaluate its reliability. These readers were often taken in by unreliable indicators such as a professional-looking name and logo, an array of scholarly references or a nonprofit URL.
When it comes to judging the credibility of information on the internet, Wineburg said, skepticism may be more useful than knowledge or old-fashioned research skills. “Very intelligent people were bamboozled by the ruses that are part of the toolkit of digital deception today,” he said.
Testing experts, not typical users
The new report builds on research that SHEG released last year, which found that students from middle school through college were easily duped by information online. In that study, SHEG scholars administered age-appropriate tests to 7,804 students from diverse economic and geographic backgrounds.
For the new report, the authors set out to identify the tactics of “skilled” – rather than typical – users. They recruited participants they expected to be skilled at evaluating information: professional fact checkers at highly regarded news outlets, PhD historians with full-time faculty positions at universities in California and Washington state, and Stanford undergraduates.
“It’s the opposite of a random sample,” Wineburg said. “We purposely sought out people who are experts, and we assumed that all three categories would be proficient.”
The study sample consisted of 10 historians, 10 fact checkers and 25 students. Each participant engaged in a variety of online searches while SHEG researchers observed and recorded what they did on-screen.
In one test, participants were asked to assess the reliability of information about bullying from the websites of two different groups: the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the world, and the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a much smaller advocacy group that characterizes homosexuality as a harmful lifestyle choice.
“It was extremely easy to see what [ACPeds] stood for,” Wineburg said – noting, for example, a blog post on the group’s site that called for adding the letter P for pedophile to the acronym LGBT. Study participants were asked to evaluate an article on the ACPeds website indicating that programs designed to reduce bullying against LGBT youth “amount to special treatment” and may “validat[e] individuals displaying temporary behaviors or orientations.”
Fact checkers easily identified the group’s position. Historians, however, largely expressed the belief that both pediatricians’ sites were reliable sources of information. Students overwhelmingly judged ACPeds’ site the more reliable one.
In another task, participants were asked to perform an open web search to determine who paid the legal fees on behalf of a group of students who sued the state of California over teacher tenure policies in Vergara v. California, a case that cost more than $1 million to prosecute. (A Silicon Valley entrepreneur financed the legal team, a fact not always mentioned in news reports about the lawsuit.) Again, the fact checkers came out well ahead of the historians and students, searching online sources more selectively and thoroughly than the others.
The tasks transcended partisan politics, Wineburg said, pointing out that advocates across the political spectrum promulgate questionable information online.
“These are tasks of modern citizenship,” he said. “If we’re interested in the future of democracy in our country, we have to be aware of who’s behind the information we’re consuming.”
Smarter way to navigate
The fact checkers’ tactic of reading laterally is similar to the idea of “taking bearings,” a concept associated with navigation. Applied to the world of internet research, it involves cautiously approaching the unfamiliar and looking around for a sense of direction. The fact checkers “understood the web as a maze filled with trap doors and blind alleys,” the authors wrote, “where things are not always what they seem.”
Wineburg and McGrew observed that even historians and students who did read laterally did not necessarily probe effectively: They failed to use quotation marks when searching for contiguous expressions, for instance, or clicked indiscriminately on links that ranked high in search results, not understanding how the order is influenced by search engine optimization. Fact checkers showed what the researchers called click restraint, reviewing search results more carefully before proceeding.
The authors of the report say their findings point to the importance of redeveloping guidelines for users of all ages to learn how to assess credibility on the internet. Many schools and libraries offer checklists and other educational materials with largely outdated criteria, Wineburg said. “Their approaches fit the web circa 2001.”
In January SHEG will begin piloting new lesson plans at the college level in California, incorporating internet research strategies drawn from the fact checkers’ tactics. Wineburg sees it as one step toward updating a general education curriculum to reflect a new media landscape and the demands of civic engagement.
In the state’s 2016 election alone, he noted, voters were confronted with 17 ballot initiatives to consider. “If people spent 10 minutes researching each one, that would be an act of incredible civic duty,” he said. “The question is, how do we make those 10 minutes count?”
From Spector, C. (2017, October 24). Stanford scholars observe “experts” to see how they evaluate the credibility of information online. Retrieved from https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/10/24/fact-checkers-ouline-information/
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While the internet has a lot of sites that claim to be reliable but aren’t, students in today’s society have been better prepared than ever to determine whether a source should be considered credible. It’s becoming something that kids today have to be able to do, because we all use the internet so much in our day to day lives.
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I think that it is a good idea to have some sort of standardized approach to evaluating the credibility and validity of sources, but is it actually feasible to do, since there are so many sources out there with very different structures and frameworks?
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I really do not think this is accurate of the majority of youth that have every used a search engine before. Often, the first result or first 5 results that come up on a search clearly state that they are an ad, and we know this. Today’s youth are not illiterate, and definitely not digitally illiterate- especially growing up in the age of the digital world when technology is thriving. In my opinion, her summary of youth’s framework for going about internet searches was not accurate in this instance.
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I am someone who can say that I read vertically very often, though I did not realize what I was doing until now. I am someone that does not look for much outside context when evaluating the source. I tend to just look at the credentials of the person writing the article and the sources they sited. I can understand the importance of reading laterally.
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It seems odd to me that we should actively be skeptic of the information and documents that we are reading, since we often read these types of media to get reliable and accurate information. The reasoning behind it does make sense, since if we are on higher alert that something may be wrong or false in the information, we are more likely to notice it. However, does this mean that there is never going to be a point when we can read a document and take its information at face value without having to fact check or be skeptical?
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This seems so bizzare to me- that students and historians could not identify a clearly biased writing that holds a firm belief against a particular group. Are schools lacking in their teaching of context clues? I would assume that a blog post from a group as prejudiced as this one would have very evident vocabulary and underlying implied meaning that decently educated people like college students and historians should be able to recognize.
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Can this be applied to learning in students? If so, how does one incorporate this into the students’ curriculum?
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I am someone who is confident in saying the fact that I am ‘trigger happy’ when it comes to clicking results. i am not someone who really works towards any specific search result. I look for something that includes my specific search terms and then I just read from there. I don’t really read very much on the synopsis, which I really feel could be an important notification.
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As we prepare for our “reading laterally” activity next Monday, please read, view, and discuss work from the Stanford History Education Group via NowComment.
Please offer one initial comment on something you notice in the video, and one initial comment on something you notice in the article. Then, reply at least once to each of the other members of your group. For instance:
What do you notice about the way that the researchers from the SHEG describe the ways most people read online? How does this compare to your own reading habits?
As you consider what the SHEG has discovered in their research, and the fact that we have midterm elections coming up in two weeks, what might you want to discuss with your friends and family?
Finally, as you consider the tools that we have been learning about in HON 206, are there ways that you might be able to change your own online reading habits to combat some of the challenges that the SHEG describes?
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