Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
Stanford researchers gave an unfamiliar website to three groups and watched how each decided whether to trust it. Undergraduates. University historians who had spent whole careers weighing the reliability of documents for a living. Professional fact-checkers from national news outlets.
The historians did badly too
Students did poorly, which will surprise nobody who has read the national survey of how American teenagers handle online sources. The historians did poorly too, and that is the part worth stopping on. These were people trained for years in evaluating sources, and they approached the site the same way the students did: reading down the page, weighing the layout, checking whether it looked serious, noting the domain. All of which is straightforward to fake.They barely read the page at all. They opened new tabs and found out who was behind it.
Fact-checkers did something else entirely. They left the page almost immediately, before forming any impression of it at all, and to the researchers watching it looked like a refusal to do the task.
Why this changes what you teach
Critical thinking gets taught as a quality of mind. Be skeptical. Consider the source. Think for yourself. All of that runs into the historians. They had the quality of mind. They were skeptical, considered, and thoughtful, and they still got it wrong, because the thing that separated the fact-checkers was not a disposition. It was a procedure. A short one, learnable in a single course, and it got the fact-checkers to sounder conclusions in a fraction of the time everybody else spent. That last part is what makes it teachable to a twelve-year-old.Sit with the timing for a moment. Reading laterally is not merely quicker than reading the page carefully; it produced better answers while costing less. So you are not asking a child to be more diligent. You are asking them to be diligent in a different order.
The procedure itself
Three questions carry almost all of it, and the order they come in is the entire trick, because two of them are useless before the first one is answered.
| Ask | Before you ask |
|---|---|
| Who is behind this | What does it say |
| What is the evidence | Does it sound reasonable |
| What do other sources say | Do I agree with it |
Leave the page.
One move sits underneath all three questions, and that is it. Whatever’s in front of you was written by somebody who wanted you to believe it, and the useful information about them is almost never on their own site. For a child, all of it collapses into one sentence they can actually use: let’s find out who made this. We run the same question in our conversation school, where somebody always turns up with something they read and wants to argue about it.What to do at home
Start with things that do not matter at all.
One video about a shark. Some claim about a cat breed. Something somebody repeated at lunch that nobody questioned, because there was no reason to. Practicing on low-stakes nonsense builds the habit without the argument that arrives the moment you pick something your child actually cares about, which is a different conversation and not one to have in the first week.
Then put a stopwatch on it, because the speed is the whole selling point. Two minutes to find out who runs a site. Timer visible. Children like this considerably more than they like being told to think critically.
Now the part I put off writing. For eleven years I told parents that children pick up languages effortlessly, the way sponges take up water. I had heard it in training. I repeated it in first lessons, in exactly the reassuring voice you would expect, and I had never once looked for where it came from. Then a father asked me. Politely, without any edge to it, at the end of a trial lesson: where does that come from? I had no answer, and the honest reconstruction is that I had never wondered.I had been reading vertically for eleven years and calling it experience.
So ask about things you believed yourself, out loud, in front of the child. I told people this for years and it turned out to be shaky teaches more than any lesson about other people being fooled, and it costs a small amount of dignity you won’t miss. And ask the question in the ordinary run of things. If it only appears when something looks suspicious, the child learns that the whole procedure is a lie detector, to be produced when an adult already smells something wrong and put away the rest of the time. It isn’t. It’s for finding out where anything came from.The AI part
Here it gets sharper. I say so as somebody who writes about these tools with more enthusiasm than most people in education, which is exactly why the next part is worth saying out loud rather than leaving to somebody less keen. A generated answer has no page to leave. No author to look up. No domain that gives anything away, no About section written by somebody with an interest. The whole lateral move has nowhere to go, and the text arrives sounding equally confident whether it is right or invented, and that is a genuinely new problem, not an old one in new clothes. So the question shifts slightly. Not who is behind this, which has no answer, but where would I check this. A model that cannot tell you where a claim came from has told you something important about the claim.Confidence of tone carries no information at all. It never did, but it used to correlate with something.
When not to bother checking
Most claims do not need any of this. Verifying everything is not thinking critically, and from outside the two look alike for about a year.A child who checks everything is not careful. They are frightened.
Consequence is the filter. Does anything change depending on whether this is true? Will somebody act on it, spend money on it, or repeat it to a person who will? If nothing turns on it, the honest answer is that it does not matter, and saying so out loud teaches proportion, which is part of the same skill.Polina was eleven when we started, in the Tucson suburbs, mostly with videos about animals. What she took from it wasn’t skepticism. Her mother had worried about exactly that, and what actually arrived was a habit of asking one question before repeating things, which made her more talkative rather than less.
At Palme School we teach online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for parents in our resource library.Frequently asked questions
A procedure rather than an attitude. The useful version is short: find out who is behind a claim, look for the evidence, and see what other sources say, in that order.
Practice on things that do not matter, and apply the filter of consequence. Verifying everything is a symptom, not a skill.
By leaving the page. Professional fact-checkers investigate a source by opening other tabs, not by studying the site itself, and this takes less time rather than more.
Partly. There is no source to investigate, so the question becomes where the claim could be verified. A tool that cannot say where something came from has told you what you need to know.
Sources
- Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Connors, P., Ortega, T., Kerr, D., & Wineburg, S. (2021). Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2(1). doi.org
- Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2021). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 50(8), 505–515. doi.org
- Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1–40. doi.org
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials for parents
Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.
