Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

“I'm Always Kind of Double‐Checking”: Exploring the Information‐Seeking Identities of Expert Generalists

“…We believe that this work complements the essential research that SHEG has conducted on the practices of professional fact‐checkers. No online information literacy curriculum could be effective without direct instruction in such skills as lateral reading or click restraint (Wineburg & McGrew, in press), or such content as the basic strategies needed to input a query into a search engine. Fact‐checkers are also better models for fast searching, the way most of us access and assess information outside of schools.…”

“…However, we distinguish our work from disciplinary literacy scholarship because we specifically did not seek out disciplinary experts (e.g., those with a PhD in an academic discipline). The limits of a disciplinary literacy approach to online information were identified by Wineburg and McGrew (in press). Their research has found that historians, those whose disciplinary literacy skills were hypothesized to be the most compatible with online literacy demands, were often fooled by deceptive websites.…”

“…Participants knew how to get started on a new investigation. When confronted with a question, topic, or information need, each had ways of taking bearings (Wineburg & McGrew, in press) or orienting themselves to the issue.…”

How Good Is This Page? Benefits and Limits of Prompting on Adolescents’ Evaluation of Web Information Quality

“…Quality issues can arise because of a topic mismatch between the document and the query, poor readability in relation to readers’ profile (e.g., documents that are difficult to understand for an adolescent because of technical jargon), an author who has no or little knowledge of the topic, and a publication date that makes the document too old to accurately address the topic, among a long list of other criteria (Britt et al., ; Rieh, ). Past research has provided many examples of such issues on the web, and ample evidence that adolescents run a high risk of missing them, partly because of their use of inconsistent and superficial cues (Foss et al., ; Gasser et al., ; Julien & Barker, ; Rouet et al., ) and their insufficient knowledge of documents as communication devices (Coiro et al., ; Mason et al., ; Wineburg & McGrew, ). However, by implementing a procedure in which a specific set of criteria and the provision of prompts and response format were systematically varied, our study sheds additional light into the conditions that might promote criteria‐based evaluation and criteria learnability.…”

“…In particular, source evaluation skills (i.e., the ability to evaluate the source, defined as information about the origin of a document and the circumstances of its production; Bromme et al., ; Rouet & Britt, ) should be considered a central component of information literacy. Students need to learn how to read laterally, such as information professionals do, to evaluate sources and decide whether they deserve credibility (Wineburg & McGrew, ). For adolescents at the middle school level, interventions should aim at fostering evaluation skills.…”