This Study Shows That Most Students Can’t Differentiate Between Articles They Read Online

This Study Shows That Most Students Can Differentiate you probably know more than what someone who lived in the 18^th century would know in their lifetime. That’s how much information we are exposed to but there is a challenge with this. All of these data has not necessarily translated into better judgement (wisdom) across board. The other problem was even more pronounced in the last American presidential election where it is said that fake news played a big role in the way the election turned out. If this position is right, it then means that some people believed some of those news.

If you doubt it, a recent Stanford study says more than 80 percent of students were unable to tell the difference between an advertisements put forward as a sponsored story and a news story. The aim of the study was to gauge just how savvy students are with respect to how they might respond to evaluations on Facebook, Twitter blogs among others.

In all, 7,804 responses were taken from students in 12 American states.

Here’s some of what the researchers had to say;

Our “digital natives” may be able to fit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfe to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that fows through social media channels, they are easily duped. We did not design our exercises to shake out a grade or make hairsplitting distinctions between a “good” and a “better” answer. Rather, we sought to establish a reasonable bar, a level of performance we hoped was within reach of most middle school, high school, and college students

For every challenge facing this nation, there are scores of websites pretending to be something they are not. Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed. But on the unregulated Internet, all bets are of. Michael Lynch, a philosopher who studies technological change, observed that the Internet is “both the world’s best factchecker and the world’s best bias confrmer— Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning November 22, 2016 When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks there are endless variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle school, high school, and college—these variations paled in comparison to a stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.