Testing Children and Adolescents’ Ability to Identify Fake News: A Combined Design of Quasi-Experiment and Group Discussions

Abstract

Nowadays, people increasingly choose to turn to the Internet and especially to social media for news and other types of content, while often not questioning the trustworthiness of the information. An acute form of this problem is that children and adolescents tend to include the use of new technologies in all the aspects of their daily life, yet most of them are unable to distinguish between fake news and trustful information in an online environment. This study is based on a Dutch empirical study and was conducted in Romania to examine whether schoolchildren and adolescents were able to identify a hoax website as fake, using a self-administrative questionnaire and open group discussions about the given online source. Similar to other studies based on the same research design, this research aims to explore the vulnerability of students to fake news and the way they experience an experimental situation in which they are exposed to online fake information. This exploratory study revealed that both children and adolescents are not preoccupied with the trustworthiness of the information they are exposed to in social media. While only 4 of the 54 students stated that they would not choose to save a fake animal (from a hoax website), all four of them had reasons that proved that they did not perceive the information as being a hoax. Thus, participants proved that they would act upon being exposed to fake information even when they do not trust the source.

La escuela: lugar de significado y compromiso

“…La incapacidad de los sistemas educativos para hacer frente a estos retos antropológicos se refleja en los preocupantes índices de violencia juvenil tanto física como en la red (Fundación Amigó, 2019); en el incremento de los trastornos de depresión, ansiedad o estrés entre los jóvenes (Brown et al, 2018;Wan Ismail et al, 2020); en la tendencia al alza de las adicciones sin sustancia (Roberts y David, 2020;Vannucci et al, 2020);en el escaso interés político; o en la limitada capacidad crítica de los primeros nativos digitales (Dumitru, 2020;INJUVE, 2017;Pattier y Reyero, 2022).…”

Children's resilience during Covid‐19 confinement. A child's perspective–Which general and media coping strategies are useful?

“…The contrasting and sometimes unverified information may lead to confusion and even panic (Ahmad & Rasool, 2020). The recognition of the disinformation may especially be difficult among children, making them more vulnerable for fake news (Dumitru, 2020) and emotional reactions. The current study will examine if children search and process information related to the Covid-19 crisis online, in general, news media and in news adjusted for children.…”

Fake News and the “Wild Wide Web”: A Study of Elementary Students’ Reliability Reasoning

“…Research processes for most of today's young learners include online searches. However, the ability to conduct online searches and discern online information is a challenge for children and adolescents [1][2][3][4], and children struggle with basic skills [5,6]. This struggle is in part due to the unique features of what we call the "wild wide web" [4], which contains unvetted content, fake news, ads, and other features that distract from desired information and make internet searches complicated [2,7].…”

“…Many students believed the tree octopus article to be credible because it had "real" pictures. If young learners trust "real" photos, then other issues present with fake news, in which articles hide behind a "mask of legitimacy" [3], may be problematic. Since this study, we have extended our work with students in grades 1-5 to evaluate concepts of online text and concepts of online research.…”