The issue: The Internet has forever changed the way people access information. But accurate, reliable information has become challenging to affirm. One possible solution is to become a Fact Checker.
For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education article Students Fall for Misinformation Online: Is Teaching Them to Read Like Fact Checkers the Solution? (April, 2019) not only summarizes the ongoing dilemma of information's credibility on the Internet but the author reveals an approach based on evidence-based research to address the "fake news" problem.
Solution: Lateral Learning. In a Stanford University doctoral study, professional fact checkers were found to take a very different approach to validating a claim than studied "historians" and undergraduate students. Fact checkers leave the site in question, open a number of windows, and find out what the rest of the internet has to say about it. This is called "lateral reading," because, instead of scrolling up and down (horizontally) a page to find clues of validity, the fact-checkers read laterally what other sites say about the claim.
Here are some resources to help learn and can be used to teach how to become a lateral reading fact checker:
