Students’ Civic Online Reasoning

A National Portrait

Bibliographic Data

ID9732102
AuthorsJoel Breakstone (0000-0003-0468-6399, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, corresponding author), Mark Smith (0000-0002-1048-7786, Stanford University, Stanford, CA), Sam Wineburg (0000-0002-4838-1522, Stanford University, Stanford, CA), Amie Rapaport (Gibson Consulting Group, Austin, TX), Jill Carle (Gibson Consulting Group, Austin, TX), Marshall Garland (Gibson Consulting Group, Austin, TX), Anna Saavedra (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA), Anna Rosefsky Saavedra (University of Southern California)
Year2021
Volume50
Issue8
Pages505-515
Publication date2021-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Researcher (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-189X • E-ISSN: 1935-102X
PublisherAmerican Educational Research Association (AERA) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3102/0013189x211017495
OpenAlexW3164656280
LanguageEN
Citations received74
References cited22

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, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The 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 home page. More than 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

Credibility · Geography · Page view · Political science · Portrait · Sample (material · Socioeconomic status · Sociology · The Internet · Computer Science · Demography · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies · Impact of Technology on Adolescents · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

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