We are in the midst of an information revolution in which we increasingly learn about the world from screens instead of print. If young people are not prepared to critically evaluate the information that bombards them online, they are apt to be duped by false claims and misleading arguments. To help teachers tackle teaching these critical skills, we’ve developed assessments of civic online reasoning—the ability to judge the credibility of the information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computer screens.
These assessments show students online content—a webpage, a conversation on Facebook, or the comment section of a news article—and ask them to reason about that content. We’ve designed paper tasks as well as tasks that students complete digitally. These tasks are intended for flexible classroom use. We hope teachers use the tasks to design classroom activities, as the basis for discussions about digital content, and as formative assessments to learn more about students’ progress as they learn to evaluate information. You can learn more about our research and development of these tasks in our report, "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning."
