Is This Fake News?

Fake news is such a problem in this day and age. As a society, we have so much information coming at us all the time that it becomes hard and exhausting to decipher what is fake and what is real. People fall for fake news because it can spread so quickly, more quickly than factual news. In the article “Why do people fall for fake news?“, it states that people fall for fact news because nowadays, we have lower attention spans and our emotions overide our ability to think critically. People can create and edit articles all the time to curate what people think they want to hear. Bias also plays a huge role in this because it can influence what we believe or what we think that we should want to click on. We have to learn how to keep our biases in check so we don’t get easily influenced by what we want to hear or see. One bias is called implicit bias which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Confirmation bias is another bias which is the tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm what we believe. 

In the article, ” It’s easier to call a fact a fact when it’s one you like, study finds“, claims that people find it easier to call something a fact when it is one that they like or want to hear. A fact is something that can be proven or disproven. An opinion is something that you take to be true because it is based on values and beliefs and can’t officially be proven or disproven. This study showed that people are most likely to identify a factual statement if it aligned with or supported their political beliefs. For example, 89 percent of Democrats identified “President Barack Obama was born in the United States” as a factual statement, while only 63 percent of Republicans did the same. As an uneducated society, we tend to gravitate to something that we believe to be true rather than actually thinking about if it is a legit fact or not. 

In a TedEd video, I learned that fake news can spread really fast because articles, posts or videos is most likely to be user-generated content. This is content that is curated to what you are interested in which makes you want to click more.  There have obviously also been so many advances in technology with the internet, how fast information is thrown at us and how quickly we can communicate with people. When we get something juicy from someone else, we don’t care enough to check if the source is reliable, we just want to see that the juicy gossip is. This is when we can fall bias to something just because it is something that we want to hear. 

Teaching students about how to identify fake news is very important. Teachers play a role in helping students understand and decipher the amount of information being thrown out at them. We need to teach students to check in on the bias of the resource and the bias within themselves. They can use tools to help fact check like using the CRAAP Test or even just going over to the google images tab helps to figure out whether it is real or fake news.

 

Teaching digital literacy in your subject area and grade range can be a transformative way to empower students to critically engage with information in our digital age. I am a science major so I decided to focus on science classes. 

 

 

 

Science Classes: 

• Focus on scientific literacy by showing how data can be manipulated visually in graphs or charts on social media.
• Guide students in evaluating the credibility of scientific claims found online by identifying authoritative sources (e.g., peer-reviewed journals vs. personal blogs).

General Curriculum Ties:

• Research Skills: Incorporate digital literacy into teaching how to gather, evaluate, and synthesize information. Students will also have to do their own research on deciding whether something is fake news or if it is real. 
• Media Studies: Explore the structure, purpose, and impact of different types of digital media and what the messages are behind the scenes.
• Ethics and Citizenship: Teach lessons on digital citizenship, including ethical engagement with technology and the responsibility of sharing accurate information.

The NCTE Framework for 21st Century Literacies highlights skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and ethical use of digital tools. Here’s some examples on how to integrate these goals:

• Collaboration: Students need to work together face-to-face or virtually. Students could collaborate on a google doc to practice evaluating sources together. 
• Critical Thinking: Students need to be taught how to spot the difference between primary and secondary sources, bias, and evidence in digital content. 
• Ethical Use of Digital Tools: Discuss the consequences of sharing misinformation. This include talking about the impact that mis spread information has on individuals and society.