Last year, there was a heartwarming story making the rounds on Facebook describing an incident about the Oscar-winning actor and director Denzel Washington visiting an Army medical center in Texas. While touring Fisher House, facilities where the families of injured soldiers stay for free, Washington asked how much it would cost to build one of the houses, and then whipped out his checkbook and wrote a check for the full amount (about $1.5 million). The story was shared widely on Facebook, both by individuals and groups. The problem was, it wasn’t true. And it wasn’t even from last year. The story went viral in 2005 (necessitating a clarification on the Fisher House website) and resurfaced in 2016. In actuality, Washington did visit Fisher House at the time and subsequently made a sizable donation to the foundation, but it didn’t happen in the dramatic fashion portrayed in the story.
That incident is fairly benign, but it’s an example of how fake news is disseminated through social media. Like many fake news stories, the Washington tale had some basis in truth, which made it all the more believable. There are of course more egregious examples of outright fictitious stories, often produced and circulated for profit or political gain (see accompanying interview with Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan), and the ability to differentiate these from credible news is becoming a vital skill; particularly for young people, who are more likely to get their news from online and social media sources.
As fake news continues to populate social media feeds and make its way into the lives of children, Upper Valley educators have addressed fake news by continuing to teach — and strengthen — critical thinking skills in nearly all grade levels and subject matter. The need for this kind of teaching is more apparent than ever.
Last November, researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education released the results of an 18-month study that evaluated middle, high school and college-aged students’ ability to assess information, and used one word to sum up their findings: Bleak. The study’s executive summary concluded with, “At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease with which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.” The researchers noted that when they began their work they had “little sense of the depth of the problem” and that their first round of piloting “shocked us into reality.”
Among the study’s findings, more than 80 percent of middle school students believed that a “sponsored content” article — a piece of content that appears on a news organization’s website that looks like a story, but is an advertisement paid for by an outside company — was a real news story; over 80 percent of high school students accepted a photograph as fact, without questioning its source or seeking verification, and when assessing a Facebook post from the actual Fox News account and an account that simply looked like Fox News, over 30 percent of students argued that the fake account was more trustworthy.
In an interview with NPR in November, the lead author of the study, Sam Wineburg, said that the findings demonstrated that U.S. classrooms haven’t caught up to the way information is influencing kids. “What we see is a rash of fake news going on that people pass on without thinking, and we really can’t blame young people because we’ve never taught them to do otherwise,” Wineburg told NPR.
Many schools in our area are teaching students to do otherwise, and have been doing so long before the term “fake news” entered the lexicon. When approached by Valley Parents for this story, educators were quick to clarify that their focus is on teaching critical thinking across a broad range of subjects.
“I just came upon the phrase ‘fake news’ a few months ago, but it’s an issue of critical thinking as an objective way to deal with an issue,” said Art Pease, who taught social studies in the Lebanon schools for 36 years, and retired in 2007. “In terms of dealing with news, as with any kind of primary source, the whole idea is to look at it and say, if this sounds suspicious, let me think about it a little more.”
Fake news is not a modern phenomenon. During the highly contentious presidential election of 1800, between President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson, each side spread vicious rumors about the other. Less than 100 years later, the term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the sensationalized and/or completely false stories put out by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in their respective papers. What is new is the speed at which information now spreads, and the difficulty of separating fact from fiction, particularly since fiction often contains some grain of truth.
While some local educators either have or are instituting curriculums directly targeting media literacy, in many cases these efforts are simply an extension of what they have been teaching students all along.
“It’s a new name for an old thing,” said Bill Hammond, principal of Marion Cross School in Norwich. “We’ve always had a curriculum on facts, opinions, rumors and gossip, and how to differentiate between what people say and the truth, but the truth is not always easy to discern.”
Hammond, who has been an educator for 35 years, said that being able to decipher the truth and what people purport to be the truth is one of the key functions of an educational system, and it starts early. He gave an example of introducing the scientific method to kindergarten students. Each fall the youngsters pick pumpkins and then categorize them by size. The students are asked if their pumpkin will sink or float in a tub of water, and are then left to discuss and formulate hypotheses. They are often surprised when the big pumpkins float as much as the smaller ones.
“The students discuss what they thought was true and what they found out was true from experimentation,” explained Hammond. “What is the difference between what we talk about and know — and what we check and know?”
Floating pumpkins might seem a long way from media literacy, but students who learn early to test theories and think critically about information presented to them will be better able to navigate an increasingly confusing, and oftentimes unreliable media landscape.
“All teachers in every grade level should be encouraging critical thinking and reasoning in their instructional time and class discourse,” said Carl Chambers, director of curriculum for the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union. “That said, we do have specific units that present a primary focus on those skills. I don’t believe anywhere in our curriculum we use the term ‘fake news’ which would have an implied political point of view. We use terms like ‘credible and reliable sources’ and ‘research-based or supported with data/evidence.’ ”
“These units encourage students to understand the power of language to influence culture and challenge the status quo, which culminates in them developing their own perspectives about the world they live in,” Chambers said.
Chambers said that the K-12 English curriculum encourages rigorous critical thinking within a thematic unit from all students, and the expectation that students will exhibit and develop such skills increases from grade to grade. At the middle and high school levels, teachers are expected to use Socratic discourse in cultivating formal discussions. Students are taught to actively listen to the comments of others, think critically and articulate their own thoughts.
“The goal is that they learn to work cooperatively and to question intelligently and civilly. We feel that those are the skills our kids need in the 21st century. They need to know how to make sense of the world around them and to go out and do the research to find out what is accurate and true,” Chambers said.
He noted that the level of questioning and rigorous discourse is dependent on the skill of each teacher to elicit critical thinking from students without inflicting their own political or world views on them.
“It’s more important that kids can determine for themselves. We don’t want to give kids a political view, that’s not our intent. They need to read with a critical eye. That’s the point,” Chambers said.
Every week, teacher Jonathan Fenton reads Junior Scholastic magazine with his fifth-grade students at Marion Cross School, and then leads a class discussion. One of the takeaways, he said, is to be skeptical regarding how much confidence to place in an individual source of information or news.
In a recent lesson, “one of the things that came up was the concept of confirmation bias, and that people tend to gravitate toward sources of information that confirm their preexisting understanding or perspective of what’s going on in the world,” Fenton said. “One way of attempting to combat this is to seek out sources of information that you would think take opposing viewpoints and an opposing perspective.”
The challenge is multi-layered. When confronted with an outright false story, it’s fairly easy to confirm or debunk it by reading a few other stories on the same subject (provided the reader is willing to take the time). Just as important, is for students to understand that even true stories from a credible source can have bias.
This is something Joy Blongewicz, librarian at Marion Cross School, has been actively focused on with the sixth-grade students. In one activity, Blongewicz presents a scenario of a proposal to build a dam and a hydroelectric plant on a scenic river to supply electricity to several large cities. She lists a biologist, owner of a popular resort, CEO of the electric company, a member of the Sierra Club, a resident of the town that would be flooded and an owner of a large business that would benefit from more electricity, along with representative statements from each in random order.
“The students have to figure out who would be saying what, so they recognize that people speak with bias depending on their needs and on their interests,” Blongewicz said. “We talk about why these individuals would have that bias.”
Another exercise Blongewicz uses is to have students research questions using specific websites that either have bias, or are outdated, too difficult for their age or contain obvious misinformation (such as a website that claims that the explorer Samuel de Champlain used radar in the 1500s). Through class discussion, students learn what makes a website credible, including how to determine whether or not the writer of a blog is a good resource.
Blongewicz says that as a librarian, it’s her responsibility to teach students how to evaluate resources. Last December she decided to teach a specific unit on fake news and discussed this with other librarians in the Norwich and Hanover schools at their monthly meeting in January.
“I want the students to have an awareness of what fake news is and that they need be critical thinkers about what they read online, especially through social media,” Blongewicz said.
In a sense, students as well as their parents need to become mini investigative reporters, probing beyond a click-bait headline, going to primary sources, reading with an eye toward bias, and seeking out sources of news from alternative viewpoints. The problem is not going to go away, and will likely get worse. Just as email users learned to ignore the enticing missives from Nigerian businessman offering get-rich-quick schemes, media consumers need to learn and adapt.
A Critical Thinking Checklist
Art Pease taught social studies and government at Lebanon High School from 1971-2007. One way he taught critical thinking to his students was by using the P.R.O.P. Analysis, which was created by Kevin Reilly, a Massachusetts social studies teacher. The idea is to ask these questions of any document to help ascertain its validity and usefulness as reliable evidence.
Primary or Secondary
Is it a primary (eyewitness) or secondary (not an eyewitness) source?
Primary is generally better, although the best, most honest eyewitness can make mistakes.
Reason to Distort
If the source is a person, does he or she have any reason to distort the evidence?
Do they have an ax to grind; the chance to gain something of value?
Other Evidence
Are there other witnesses, statements, recordings or evidence that reports the same data, information or knowledge?
Does the other evidence support the assertions of the document being considered?
Public or Private
Is it a public or private statement?
In general, a private statement, such as a diary, is more likely to contain the writer’s honest opinion.