“One Way to Fight Fake News” from The Chronicle of Higher Education http://www.chronicle.com/article/one-way-to-fight-fake-news/241726
Excerpt (emphasis mine):
Why did the fact-checkers prevail where students at a top college and historians — who, as the report notes, “evaluate sources for a living” — stumbled? They read differently. The students and historians tended to read “vertically,” the report notes, delving deeply into a website in their efforts to determine its credibility. That, the researchers point out, is more or less the approach laid out in many checklists designed to help students use the internet well, which tend to suggest looking at particular features of a website to evaluate its trustworthiness.
The fact checkers, in contrast, read “laterally,” turning to sources beyond the website in question — and not treating them all as being equally reliable, either. They succeeded, the report says, “not because they followed the advice we give to students. They succeeded because they didn’t.”
I think I’m going to bookmark the two pages used in the study for use in info lit courses. Kind of alarming that even 50% of historians didn’t click about ACPeds. Even if you read vertically, you can find politicised content, that the President is regularly consulted by Breitbart and so on. Let alone the look of the page!
Inside Higher Ed has picked up on this study https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/black-box-problem – which led me to the excellent article “Chucking the Checklist” that I found some years ago by Marc Meola, which changed how we approached discussing evaluation with students at Lincoln University http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.canterbury.ac.nz/article/170687