Digital Smarts - Lateral Reading Helps Students Ferret Out Misinformation

Researchers at Stanford University are working with journalism groups to develop a news and Internet literacy curriculum designed to teach students how to sort fact from fiction. The free online curriculum, called Civic Online Reasoning, teaches skills including lateral reading, which professional fact-checkers use to evaluate the credibility of information sources. Lateral reading is a strategy for investigating who is behind an unfamiliar online source by opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source.