Information Literacy 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 …

An Interactive Tutorial: Evaluating Online Sources Through Lateral Reading, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

Critical evaluation of online sources has become a necessary skill in everyday life. With the prevalence of fake news, pseudoscience, and deep fake videos, how can a person determine if a source is legitimate? While in some cases it’s fairly obvious when a source is suspect, at other times determining a source’s credibility isn’t so straightforward.

Recent research indicates that both university professors and college students have difficulty recognizing misleading online sources that at first glance look reputable. The close reading skills that are key to much of academic work differ from the online evaluation strategies needed when quickly determining …

Trust, Criticality, & The Open Web: Three Approaches To Teaching Lateral Reading, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis, Rachel Flynn, Yan He

Libraries Scholarship

Presentation presented at 2021 ACRL conference.

Learning objectives:

• Become familiar with the practice and importance of lateral reading (LR) and the skills and mindsets it involves.
• Become familiar with different approaches to teaching LR and challenges of learning and teaching about it.
• Reflect on the potential relevance and applications of LR in your own teaching context.

Description:

Lateral reading - the process of moving off of a webpage to see what others say about it - has become critical for effectively evaluating online sources. While lateral reading appears simple, teaching it reveals layers of complexity, which include deciding where …

Sifting And Four-Moving Online: Opportunities And Challenges With Teaching Lateral Reading Through An Online Module (Conference Presentation), Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

As the ways in which information gets produced and distributed online have substantially changed, librarians’ approaches to teaching source evaluation are also evolving. Many librarians are pointing out the limitations of formulaic approaches to source evaluation (e.g., checklists like CRAAP and RADCAB), given how source evaluation has become increasingly challenging in online environments. Research on “lateral reading” from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and from Mike Caulfield has informed much of this work. In a 2016 study SHEG found that professional fact-checkers who practice “lateral reading” - spending little time on a website and more time reading what other …