They say we shouldn’t trust everything we see online, but how do we identify the things we can’t and can trust? That’s what we as teachers need to help students do and the best way to combat fake news is by improving students’ digital literacy. As a future high school teacher in the math area I will focus on how I can tie in digital literacy in that area. The National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE) lay out a set of goals to improve digital literacy, which can be found here. I will show how teaching students about fake news in math hits these goals.

Math and fake news are connected in a few ways the 2 main ways are statistics and graphs. False conclusions being drawn from statistics is very common and teaching students to always question the conclusions from a study is important. There can also be misleading variables in the study which causes the results to reflect a false outcome. This makes it very important for students to understand statistics so they don’t fall victim to false conclusions or misleading studies.  The video below serves as a good resource for this lesson.

Graphing is super common in high school math, as it is in pretty much every math class. Graphs can be used in misleading ways by messing with the x and y scales. This allows people to create a graph depicting the outcome they want others to believe rather than the actual one. This means it is very important for students to understand graphing and how messing with the scales on the axes effect a graph. Teaching students about this and statistics hits the goal “Explore and engage critically, thoughtfully, and across a wide variety of inclusive texts and tools/modalities” from the NTCE. The following video serves as a great resource for helping students see this first hand.

In both these cases it’s important to mention how our own bias may effect the chances we fall for a false study or graph. As explained in this article we are more likely to take something as a fact when it aligns with our established beliefs. This can cause us to miss the red flags within the statistics or graph and blindly believe something that isn’t actually backed up by the data. This will hit the goal “Determine how and to what extent texts and tools amplify one’s own and others’ narratives as well as counter unproductive narratives” from the NTCE as we look at how studies and statistics can reinforce our biases.