McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The challenge that’s bigger than fake news: Civic reasoning in a social media environment. American Educator, (3), 4. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.510636805&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Description: This scholarly article critiques common strategies used to teach news literacy, arguing that many lesson plans only teach young people to analyze the surface of a website and that “determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy” (4).

Why I trust it: Sarah McGrew, one of the article’s authors, co-directs the Civic Online Reasoning Project at the Stanford History Education Group with Joel Breakstone. Breakstone’s research focuses on instructional assessment. Sam Wineburg is the founder of the project and is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford. Teresa Ortega is the project manager.

Use: Use this resource to critique and strengthen your news and web literacy lesson plans.

Access: You can access this through the Gale database through the University at Albany Libraries. If you are a current student, faculty, or staff member, you can proxy into the server using your UAlbany ID. Otherwise, you can visit one of the library buildings and use a guest computer pass to access the database.