Digital Smarts - Strategies to Help Kids Identify Fake News

Recently released PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) study results revealed that only 14 percent of U.S. students were able to reliably distinguish between fact and opinion. PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years. These findings are particularly alarming in these times when many rely on social media to get their news – a place where everyone has an opinion. In a commentary reaction to these results, Chris Link of the Global STEM Alliance at the New York Academy of Sciences shares strategies to help teachers and parents improve students' ability to identify information that is false or biased. One of the exercises he suggests is providing students with links to legitimate looking sites containing false information to see if they are deceived. He says, “experiences like these, where students are challenged to consider the validity of information and sort what’s real from what’s fake, would better prepare them not only to be savvier consumers of news, but also to someday digest contradictory information to make complicated decisions about their own health care, finances or civic engagement”.