LibGuides: Fake News, Misleading News, Biased News: Assignments on Evaluating Sources

Assignments

Caulfield, Mike. The Four Moves: Adventures in Fact-Checking for Students
"The Four Moves blog is maintained by Mike Caulfield, who has been helping teachers integrate digital citizenship skills into the classroom for over 10 years"
Civic Online Reasoning (COR)
The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments to teach students to evaluate online information.
CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments). Evaluating news sites: Credible or Clickbait?
As people rely more and more on social media to get their news, the filter bubble becomes increasingly problematic. In this workshop, students learn how to evaluate whether a news site is reliable. This group activity takes about 30 minutes and can be used for many different audiences by adjusting the examples used.
McCormick Foundation. Introduction to news literacy: Structured engagement with current and controversial issues.
Browse the News Literacy Project for assignment ideas.
University of Delaware. Curing fake news phobia (Google Doc with lesson plan - by Lauren Wallis)
Whiting, Jacquelyn. (2019, September 4). Everyone has invisible bias. This lesson shows students how to recognize it. EdSurge.

More Assignments

C-SPAN Classroom: Lesson idea: Media Literacy and Fake News

SchoolJournalism.com News and media literacy lessons.

Walsh-Moorman, Elizabeth and Katie Ours. Introducing lateral reading before research MLA Style Center. (Objectives include identifying credibitilty and/or bias of a course, identifying how professional fact-checkers assess iinformation vs a general audience.)

The Media Manipulation Casebook
Includes methods, definitions of terms related to misinformaiton, disinformation, and media manipulation.

A Course on News Literacy

Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens A six week course
offered by The University of Hong Kong & The State University of New York via Coursera, Audit the course for free. Resources include a glossary of terms such as bias, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, propaganda, selective dissonance, verfication, etc.

News Literacy. Digital Resource Center. Stony Brook University

Stony Brook University. Digital Resources Center. The 14 Lessons This course pack consists of lessons that can be taught in sequence or separately and cover topics such as verification, fairness and balance, bias, etc. This material is the basis for the Coursera course (above) on news literacy.

Fake New: Curriculum. Cal State University Long Beach

Fake News: Curriculum
Curriculum about fake news, curriculum guides, presentations; instructional strategies from librarian Lesley Farmer.

Fake News in First-Year Writing - Paul Corrigan

Corrigan, Paul T. Fake News in First-Year Writing. Writing Commons.org
A description of a first-year writing course that integrates feeling and fact-checking with a description of the writing projects.

Need to Evaluate a Source? Try a Worksheet

Evaluating Web Sites: A Checklist (University of Maryland)

Quality of News Sources - You Decide!

Vanessa Otero Quality of News Sites form

Vanessa Otero - a patent attorney - developed a chart to track media bias. For her static charts, see Media Bias Chart. Attached: An older blank version of her chart so you can put in your own assessments.

Nova Libraries. Fairness Meter Poster (NewseumED)
Some inforamtion on media bias developed for a public speaking course.

Overview

Valenza, J. (2016, November 26). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world. School Library Journal.

A course from University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Calling Bullshit - Course Syllabus
A proposal for a course by two professors from University of Washington, Seattle meant to teach students how to recognize. bullshit. "Bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence."

A course from University of Michigan on fake news

Fake News, Lles, and Propaganda: The Class
An entire seven week course developed by librarians at the University of Michigan.

Learning Tools Suggested by Richard Byrne

Can You Spot the Problem with These Headlines? A TED-Ed lesson.
Checkology: A free version with interactive modules (that become increasingly difficult.)
Civic Online Reasoning: Lesson plans
From the Stanford History Education Group. (SHEG). Lessons on lateral reading with fact-checking organizations, who's behind the information? What's the evidence? Create a free account to the SHEG to access these lessons.
Spot the Troll
A troll is a fake social media account, often created to spread misleading information.- Learn to spot them! From Clemson University's Media Forensics Lab
This One Weird Trick Will Help You Spot Clickbait. A TED-Ed lesson