Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live Internet connection, students responded to six constructed-response tasks. Students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two-thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s homepage. Over half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look”, its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date created | April 7, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Breakstone, Joel | |
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Author | Smith, Mark | |
Author | Wineburg, Sam | |
Author | Rapaport, Amie | |
Author | Carle, Jill | |
Author | Garland, Marshall | |
Author | Saavedra, Anna |
Subjects
Subject | assessment |
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Subject | digital literacy |
Subject | civics |
Subject | Stanford Graduate School of Education |
Subject | Stanford History Education Group |
Genre | Article |
Bibliographic information
Related item | |
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Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/cz440cm8408 |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (in press). Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A national portrait.
Educational Researcher. https://purl.stanford.edu/cz440cm8408
Collection
Graduate School of Education Open Archive
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- Contact
- breakstone@stanford.edu
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