3 Tips for Teachers to Help Teens Distinguish Fact From Fiction

The rise in websites dispensing false information has become a problem for Facebook. But for one high school teacher, having students take misinformation at face value is nothing new -- though it's gotten worse.

"I'm constantly got kids coming to me, 'Did you know?' insert whatever conspiracy theory," says Dave Stuart Jr., who teaches world history at Cedar Springs High School in Michigan. "Ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon never happened, to current events-related stuff."

The Common Core standards focus strongly on skills that should prepare students to detect fake news -- the standards emphasize the need for students to write and read arguments using and looking for strong reasoning and evidence, says Dana Maloney, an English teacher at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.

[How to talk to teens about being responsible on social media.]

However, students overall aren't very good at evaluating the credibility of online information, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford University of middle school, high school and college students.

"You cannot flourish in an information age if you are not able to discern the validity of information; you just can't do it," Stuart says.

High school teachers can use some of the following tips from other educators to teach the media literacy and critical thinking skills needed to assess information.

1. Teach teens to question the source: Two key skills for students to have are to be able to question a source and to corroborate what is being presented with other sources when vetting credibility, Stuart says.

Students should ask who wrote the information, when and where -- see if an author is even listed, he says. To corroborate, students could see what other articles say, if they agree and why or why not.

"A problem -- not just with fake news but even biased news -- is we often just one stop shop for our news," he says. Just like students wouldn't corroborate what happened during a historical period by looking at one primary source document, he says, one shouldn't look at only one article for their news.

2. Help students identify credible sources: Tara Kajtaniak, an English teacher at Fortuna High School in California, trains her students to look for credible websites and sources.

"I gave them a list of credible news sources, but I'm clear about their neutrality or lack thereof," she says. She also introduced her students to databases and how websites like Wikipedia and Quora work.

"I'm like, 'I love Wikipedia, here's what I love about it. Here's why I never cite it in an academic paper,'" she says.

Teaching students how to blog may help them become better at recognizing the quality of blogs as well, she says.

[Get three tips for high school teachers to use social media responsibly in class.]

3. Give students regular opportunities to practice vetting information: "A standalone mini lesson that is never practiced again is ineffective," says Kajtaniak.

These media literacy skills need to be taught in all subject areas -- not just English -- because students need to know how to evaluate sources of information in all content areas in age appropriate ways, she says.

Stuart says one popular exercise is called " Article of the Week." Each week, students read and assess a recent news article.

Teachers could also give students the chance to discuss these issues with each other, he says, and could have short pop-up debates on the validity of a set of sources, for example.

"I think sometimes we don't give the kids enough credit -- that they could actually enjoy being given chances to critically assess the validity of sources," says Stuart.

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Alexandra Pannoni is an education digital producer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at apannoni@usnews.com.