Fifth-graders can learn to detect fake news through practice games.
Evidence
What about those “digital natives” who are still too young for college, but will grow up in a world of fake news and deception that they must learn to navigate? One of the most heartening stories I’ve read comes from Scott Bedley, a fifth-grade teacher in Irvine, California, who is teaching his class how to spot fake news by giving them a rubric of things to watch for, then testing them with examples. … I needed my students to understand that “fake news” is news that is being reported as accurate, but lacks reliability and credibility. A good example are the widely shared stories of the pope endorsing one presidential candidate over another. I decided to devise a game, the goal being to tell fake news from real news. … My students absolutely loved the game. Some refused to go to recess until I gave them another chance to figure out the next article I had queued. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 235
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: media-literacy education as inoculation against post-truth, using a rubric-plus-game model tested with kids.
- SHARE: For a teacher friend: the pope-endorsement story as a teachable fake-news example that hooked fifth-graders.
- XREF: connects to: Education lowers fake-news belief but not susceptibility to illusory truth — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 72; Cultural preoccupations canalized attention research, pathologizing kids via a game — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 157
Broader Connections
- Education lowers fake-news belief but not susceptibility to illusory truth
#qualifies(0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 72 - Cultural preoccupations canalized attention research, pathologizing kids via a game
#responds-to(0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 157