Sam Wineburg’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

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Publications (52)


Distinguishing Credible from Sham: Supporting Young People to Navigate Online
  • Chapter
  • Full-text available

December 2024

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10 Reads

Joel Breakstone

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Sarah McGrew

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Sam Wineburg

Teenagers in the United States spend over 8 hours on digital devices outside of schoolwork each day (Rideout et al. The Common Sense census: media use by tweens and teens. Common Sense Media, 2021), where they encounter information that ranges from educational to toxic. Despite their fluency with digital devices, young people struggle to evaluate the information that streams across their screens. There are evidence-based approaches for helping students to become more discerning consumers of digital content. Based on research with professional fact checkers, these interventions have been proven across a range of contexts to help people learn effective evaluation strategies. Unfortunately, outdated educational approaches to digital literacy remain widely used. As states across the country adopt legislation mandating media literacy instruction, a series of research questions deserve attention: (1) How can adults be supported to learn and teach digital literacy? (2) How do schools integrate digital literacy into the curriculum? (3) How do young people’s beliefs and identities influence their evaluations? (4) How do we reach people outside of school settings and how can trusted messengers (e.g., parents, health professionals, and community leaders) provide instruction about evidence-based strategies for evaluating online information?

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Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation

May 2024

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386 Reads

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61 Citations

Nature Human Behaviour

Anastasia Kozyreva

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[...]

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Sam Wineburg

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of falsehoods. Here we introduce a toolbox of individual-level interventions for reducing harm from online misinformation. Comprising an up-to-date account of interventions featured in 81 scientific papers from across the globe, the toolbox provides both a conceptual overview of nine main types of interventions, including their target, scope and examples, and a summary of the empirical evidence supporting the interventions, including the methods and experimental paradigms used to test them. The nine types of interventions covered are accuracy prompts, debunking and rebuttals, friction, inoculation, lateral reading and verification strategies, media-literacy tips, social norms, source-credibility labels, and warning and fact-checking labels.


Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

November 2022

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144 Reads

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65 Citations

Current Directions in Psychological Science

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.


Civic Preparation for the Digital Age: How College Students Evaluate Online Sources About Social and Political Issues

June 2022

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148 Reads

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27 Citations

The Journal of Higher Education

The ability to find credible information online is necessary for informed civic engagement in the 21st century. This need is particularly acute for young people, who often turn to the Internet to learn about social and political issues. Preparing students to evaluate online content, particularly as it concerns social and political issues, aligns with broader efforts to reinvigorate the civic mission of colleges and universities. We analyzed how college students (n= 263) evaluated online sources about public policy issues. Results showed that a majority employed ineffective strategies for evaluating digital information. Many of the strategies students used mirrored advice found on college and university websites. These findings suggest a need to reconsider post-secondary approaches to teaching online evaluation strategies.



Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes

April 2022

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148 Reads

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114 Citations

Journal of Educational Psychology

In a study conducted across an urban school district, we tested a classroom-based intervention in which students were taught online evaluation strategies drawn from research with professional fact checkers. Students practiced the heuristic of lateral reading: leaving an unfamiliar website to search the open Web before investing attention in the site at hand. Professional development was provided to high school teachers who then implemented six 50-minute lessons in a district-mandated government course. Using a matched control design, students in treatment classrooms (n = 271) were compared to peers (n = 228) in regular classrooms. A multilevel linear mixed model showed that students in experimental classrooms grew significantly in their ability to judge the credibility of digital content. These findings inform efforts to prepare young people to make wise decisions about the information that darts across their screens.


Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait

May 2021

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367 Reads

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158 Citations

Educational Researcher

Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.


Figure 1. Mean pretest and posttest scores by test order.
Race, gender, and ethnicity of participants.
Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course

February 2021

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834 Reads

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71 Citations

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced college students to spend more time online. Yet many studies show that college students struggle to discern fact from fiction on the Internet. A small body of research suggests that students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging the credibility of online sources. But what about asynchronous remote instruction? In an asynchronous college nutri-tion course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet web-sites using fact checkers’ strategies. Chief among these strategies was lateral reading, the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site. Students im-proved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post interven-tion. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.



Citations (45)


... Understanding behavioral homophily is crucial for analyzing network cohesion and societal impact. It offers insights into user interactions and content exposure, with implications for improving recommendations, mitigating polarization, fostering inclusive networks, and designing effective interventions [23,40]. ...

Reference:

Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
  • Citing Article
  • May 2024

Nature Human Behaviour

... Despite the widespread acknowledgment of disinformation as a societal threat in various fields of study, including political science (Guess et al., 2020;Walter et al., 2020), psychological science (Kozyreva et al., 2022;Pennycook, McPhetres et al., 2020), behavioral public policy (Reijula & Hertwig, 2022), communication (Vraga & Tully, 2021), information science (Celik et al., 2021), and economics (Abeler et al., 2019;Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) there was a significant gap in understanding how the individual DML skills of access, analysis, evaluation, and creation (AAEC), influenced individuals' ability to discern truth. Existing studies explored aspects of investigating the credibility of the source (Visentin et al., 2019) and improving truth discernment (Rosenzweig et al., 2021), but few have examined the distinct impacts of these skills on the accuracy of truth discernment. ...

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
  • Citing Article
  • November 2022

Current Directions in Psychological Science

... Cuando analizamos las habilidades que son clave para los fact checkers, es decir, aquellas personas u organizaciones especializadas en identificar la veracidad de la información en línea (Aceituno & Izquierdo, 2024;Breakstone et al., 2022;McGrew, 2022), podemos evidenciar que estos especialistas desarrollan al menos tres habilidades fundamentales: el análisis de la evidencia (Evidence Analysis), es decir, aquella capacidad de discernir si las pruebas proceden de una fuente fiable y sopesar si son pertinentes las afirmaciones que se realizan, la investigación de afirmaciones (Claim Research), que es la capacidad de comprobar si una afirmación es precisa utilizando un motor de búsqueda y otras fuentes de internet y la lectura lateral (Lateral reading), que implica abrir nuevas pestañas en el navegador, y buscar por la web otros sitios para confirmar la fiabilidad de la fuente de información. ...

Civic Preparation for the Digital Age: How College Students Evaluate Online Sources About Social and Political Issues
  • Citing Article
  • June 2022

The Journal of Higher Education

... Studierende entwickeln CT während ihrer Schullaufbahn nicht hinreichend [4,5,6] und diese Fähigkeit wird von den Universitäten oft nur begrenzt gefördert [7,8] → Die valide Erfassung von CT mittels Performance Assessments (PA) ist eine zentrale Voraussetzung zur Förderung [9,10] Beim Lernen mit frei zugänglichen digitalen Ressourcen werden Studierende mit der Herausforderung konfrontiert, oft auf unzuverlässige, ungenaue oder falsche Informationen zu stoßen [1,2] ...

Science Education in an Age of Misinformation

... With lateral reading, users read across the web by opening new browser tabs to find other evidence and perspectives when faced with an unknown website or source. Research has found that with direct instruction, lateral reading can be effective in helping users determine source credibility (Wineburg et al., 2022). Much of the research has been done with young people in school settings, though Fendt et al. found that among older participants "lateral reading may have increased participants' knowledge of news authors' identity, thus stimulating analytic processing, and enabled the participants to evaluate the information in a more differentiated manner" (2023, p. 8). ...

Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes

Journal of Educational Psychology

... As shown by Wineburg and McGrew (2019), professional fact checkers, compared with college students, tended to evaluate online information by checking multiple online resources to validate the information and source in question (i.e., lateral reading). According to Wineburg and McGrew (2019), even historians failed to use evaluation strategies well suited to an online environment because they did not check multiple online resources to validate currently read information. Kiili, Brante, et al. (2020) have suggested that sourcing also may be important in trying to integrate information across resources, helping students to include different perspectives on the same issue in their written texts. ...

Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information
  • Citing Article
  • November 2019

Teachers College Record

... In essence, lateral reading is based on a simple strategy for verifying information (Breakstone et al., , 2024McGrew & Breakstone, 2023;Wineburg et al., 2021), which resembles the work methods of professional fact-checkers. Such a "reading" strategy is often contrasted with vertical reading-a strategy people typically use when reading texts continuously. ...

Preparing Students for Civic Life in a Digital Age
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... People increasingly get their news and information from social media platforms (54% of US adults, per Pew Research (Social Media and News Fact Sheet)), and "teenagers swim in a sea of digital information." (Breakstone et al., 2021) More than 75% of students in the US report getting their news "often" or "sometimes" from social media, and 69% report getting their news from videos on sites like YouTube 6 In a sense, this still constitutes a replacement of expertise. After all, by recognizing expertise the crowd is fulfilling an important function of credentialing institutions, and the work of such institutions is often performed by experts. ...

Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
  • Citing Article
  • May 2021

Educational Researcher

... This research is valuable as there may be a tendency to characterise all young people as struggling with information literacy and related source credibility assessment due to some widely publicised studies with highly negative findings (e.g. Breakstone et al., 2021); however, this research acts as a reminder that there may be heterogeneity in young people's relevant skills within and across contexts. ...

Students' Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Las investigaciones de Stanford han incorporado estas habilidades a un modelo que surge del aprendizaje de la historia, donde también se utiliza la comprobación y el análisis de fuentes, aunque de una manera distinta y debe ser complementado por las propuestas de los chequeadores de contenido, que son capaces de utilizarlas en contextos distintos a los académicos (historiadores o profesores de historia) (McGrew, 2021;McGrew & Byrne, 2020;Wineburg et al., 2018). Como hemos observado en este caso, la lectura lateral es una de las que muestra más carencia, ya que esta habilidad supone una tarea de complejidad mayor en la medida que para contrastar con otras fuentes de información se debe navegar por diversas pestañas y rastrear finalmente el origen de la información (Breakstone et al., 2021). Por otra parte, si nosotros usamos las estrategias de los fact checkers debemos pensar que una de las primeras tareas que deben realizar los estudiantes, incluso antes que evaluar el contenido en profundidad, es que se debe verificar la información sobre la organización patrocinadora o el autor, buscando información sobre ellos fuera del propio sitio, utilizando artículos de noticias y sitios de fact-checking para obtener más información sobre la fuente y sus posibles motivaciones para presentar la información (Brodsky et al., 2021;Kozyreva et al., 2023;Ziv & Bene, 2022). ...

Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course