Today's teens have grown up online. They socialize online. They do homework online. And surely they get their news online. But because they are so comfortable with the Internet, they seldom question the news stories online and pass along to their friends.
Now William Colglazier, a history teacher at a high school in America, is teaching his students how to think critically about online information and recognize a "fake(假的)news" story. His idea came from a study on people's online reasoning at Stanford University. The study found that young people lack
(缺少)ability to reason about the information on the Internet. Most middle school students in the study could not tell the difference between an advertisement and a news story, and high school and college students fully trusted the websites ending in"org".
The good news is that, according to Colglazier, once teens realize they've been duped, they have strong will to tell truth from lies." But they need some pointers on how to find dependable and persuasive evidence(证据)and how to recognize when others use poor argumentation, "he said. Some of the pointers
that Colglazier offers his students include moving off the site to find more information about the site and the writer's motivations(动机), looking past the first page of results in a google search and looking at the second or third page, and going beyond the "About Us" page on a website to find out more about the organization behind the news story.
Colglazier has tips for parents as well. He says it's a good idea for parents to be "friends" with their kids on social media(媒体)to see what stories they are sharing. He also suggests parents watch their teens as they search for something online and ask questions like "Why did you click on that?" and "Do you trust this information?" Those questions can lead kids to form habits of thinking critically about online information.
Colglazier shared some of his course with other teens in Teen Vogue, a famous magazine. He hopes more kids would take away some knowledge about thinking critically when they read news online. "The Internet is both beautiful and ugly", he said. "If people cannot tell real news from fake news, the results can be frightening."
