14 Fake News
Textbook Chapters (or similar texts)
Popular Press Articles
Games
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Inquiry-based Activity: Can you fool your neighbor?
Introduction: “Fake news: has become a buzzword in the current world climate. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, students are constantly confronted with the need to distinguish truth from fiction. In this activity, students will take a step back from the stories that they see every day and decide what evidence (and from whom) is required for a statement to be credible. They will then look at it from another angle and decide if a set of evidence and sources is enough for them to consider a statement true. At the end of this activity, students should feel more comfortable using their critical thinking skills to make sense of the news around them.
Question to pose to students: What type of evidence is required to convince someone a story is real?
(dependent upon group)
Questions could include the following, or variants thereof:
There is an outbreak of food poisoning in the most popular dining hall.
There is a secret tunnel under your campus running from the library to the football stadium.
To make the exercise more convincing, you an integrate real stories that have previously happened at your institution or in the local area. Ideally, these stories would be old enough such that students would not have personally experienced them.
Regardless of whether you include actual stories, students should be told that half of the scenarios are true and half of them are not. This way, in the “test your hypotheses” step, students do not merely say that every single statement is false, regardless of the strength of the evidence.
Students form a hypothesis: In small groups, students should come up with the evidence that would be required to support the statement they have been assigned. They should then think of what sources would need to tell people about the evidence in order for it to be reliable. The sources they should consider should be a combination of primary (e.g., the dining hall director) and secondary (e.g., the student newspaper) sources. If you have included stories that have actually occurred on your campus/in your area, do not tell the groups if their assignment is real or not.
Students test their hypotheses: Each student group should pair up with another student group. If your class is large enough that statements have been repeated, make sure each paired group has a different statement. Then, have them exchange statements, evidence, and sources. Each group should consider the evidence for the other group’s statement and decide whether the evidence is sufficient to support the claim or not. If the group deems the evidence strong enough, why did they reach that decision? If the group deems that the evidence is not strong enough, what additional evidence or sources would be needed to change their minds? Why were the sources identified not “good” enough?
Do the students’ hypotheses hold up?: Come together as a class and poll the student groups. How many of them that their paired groups’ statement had sufficient evidence vs. not? For those who did not think there was sufficient evidence, were their trends as to what additional evidence would be required? Were there trends about what topics were more believed vs. others? For example, did statements that required a degree of scientific knowledge (e.g., about medicine or research findings) require more or less evidence? How can this be applied to the interactions with media in the real world? Do we accept statements in the real world even when the evidence seems shoddy? Who are we willing to believe in the real world that we wouldn’t in a scholarly setting?
