Researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year studying how well students across the country evaluate online sources of information. Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were “shocked” — their word — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information. The students displayed a “stunning and dismaying consistency” in their responses,  being duped time and time again and again. They weren’t looking for high-level analysis of data but just a “reasonable bar” of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles. A professional appearance and polished “About” section could easily persuade students that a site was neutral and authoritative, the study found, and young people tended to credulously accept information as presented even without supporting evidence or citations.

– Most middle school students can’t tell “sponsored content” from genuine articles.

– Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them.

– Many high school students couldn’t tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook, even though the genuine articles had a blue checkmark. Over 30 percent of students argued that the fake account was more trustworthy than the verified one with the mark!

– Presented with a tweet from MoveOn about gun owners’ feelings on background checks ,  less than a third of undergraduate students cited the political agenda of MoveOn.org as a reason it might be a flawed source.  More than half of the students didn’t even click on the link within the tweet before evaluating the usefulness of the data.

– Most Stanford students couldn’t identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.

-Faced with articles from the American Academy of Pediatrics  (65,000 members and around since 1930) and the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) (which objects to parenting by same-sex couples, claims homosexuality is linked to pedophilia, and is  classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) more than half of the undergraduates concluded that the article from ACPeds was ‘more reliable,’ the researchers wrote. Even students who preferred the entry from the American Academy of Pediatrics never uncovered the differences between the two groups.  (NPR News item)

Schools and universities are still teaching students to read vertically when they should be instructing them to read like fact checkers, that is, looking for other evidence, for other sources of similar news or information.  You cannot rely of Google or others to rank things by reliability, zap the liars , the crude and the crass.  Nor should you accept as correct a site that is well designed, easy to navigate and confident in its approach.  Unfortunately, you have to be skeptical at all times: “what is the agenda of this organisation, who  are its backers, what are the antecedents of the writers (if possible)”.  But then this is what a proper education should do – to encourage you to ask questions, and take nothing for granted, and to think for yourself.  In this we seem to be failing.