Library and Information Science Commons^™

Online Source Evaluation Through “Lateral Reading”: A Workshop For Educators, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

Learning Outcomes:

• Become familiar with and apply lateral reading strategies to evaluating online sources.
• Explore ways to teach lateral reading to students in your educational context.

Audience: All educators, including K-12 teachers, public librarians, academic librarians, educational administrators and community organizers)

Both everyday life experience and a growing body of research show just how hard it is to determine the credibility of online sources. Traditional checklist approaches to evaluating websites (e.g., the CRAAP test) are ineffective, despite their continued prevalence. A more effective approach to quickly assessing the credibility of an online source is lateral reading. “Lateral reading” essentially involves …

Diving Below The Surface: A Layered Approach To Teaching Online Source Evaluation Through Lateral And Critical Reading, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

As online environments have in many ways changed how information (including misinformation) is created and distributed, many educators have recognized a need for teaching new strategies for evaluating online sources for credibility and potential bias. Educators like Mike Caulfield and research groups like the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) have stressed the need for “lateral reading,” a habit of fact-checking when initially evaluating a source. When reading laterally, a person doesn’t spend extensive time initially examining what a source says about itself; instead, they quickly move off of the site in question to look at what others have said about …