Teaching fact checking in schools

An unexpected lesson

It’s February 2017, at a primary school in Greater Manchester. BBC Newsround and Full Fact are in the classroom, sharing a series of news stories with the 9-11 year-olds. A robot becoming a headteacher at a Welsh school; a woman giving birth to a four-stone baby; a UFO sighting. These are just some of the stories we’ve brought along. The class find the stories surprising, almost unbelievable, and all of them are deep in thought about what they’re reading.

Then comes the big reveal: every story we’ve brought with us is made-up. The examples were manufactured especially for the lesson. Every child looks stunned, and you can see years of implicit trust in news and responsible adults suddenly come into focus.

It wasn’t that they hadn’t spotted some of the ‘clues’: the hard-to-believe storylines; the fact they’d never heard of the outlets supposedly publishing the stories; the occasional spelling mistake or poor-quality picture. It simply hadn’t occurred to them that news stories could be fabricated, and then presented to them in a classroom as if they were true. In spite of the odd things: they did look like news articles, and news is supposed to be surprising — otherwise it wouldn’t be news!

I realised that day that one of the most powerful tools we have when teaching misinformation is simply raising awareness. Everyone knows what lying is and a lot of us are capable of spotting it; the skill is remembering to turn your lie detector on when it matters.

Why fact checking matters

At Full Fact, as the UK’s independent fact checking charity, we’ve been helping to spot and root out bad information since we were formed in 2010. The core of what we do is publishing fact checks on a daily basis: each time taking a claim, working out how well it reflects what we know about reality, and communicating what we’ve discovered.

As well as informing our readers about specific claims and issues, that work is about ensuring that people who choose to create and spread bad information have a hard time. By raising awareness of mistakes and wrongdoing wherever we find it, we both help our readers decide who and what they can trust to tell the truth, and show them how they can respond and hold claimants to account.

It’s just as important to raise awareness of why bad information spreads. “Fake news” just doesn’t cut it as a term to describe the issue: it makes us think of some dastardly villain or outlet manufacturing stories intended to deceive us. But bad information spreads just as easily when we make honest mistakes or click “share” with good intentions, believing that what we’ve read is important information for our friends and family to know.

The key to stemming the spread of bad information is to encourage both vigilance when people consume news, by showing them all the ways things can and do go wrong, and active checking of information when something doesn’t seem right. In other words, fact checking can’t just be for fact checkers. The more people there are actively questioning the information they are given, the harder it is for people who spread that information to cause widespread harm.

Which brings us back to that Manchester classroom in 2017, when we helped show young children that sometimes, what you see in the news isn’t the whole story. We followed that up by showing them how they could start actively checking news for themselves.

Critical thinking comes first

Teaching people to actively check news and online content starts with an admission: it’s impossible to check everything. There is such a thing as being “too sceptical”, or even cynical, and it takes the joy out of consuming and thinking about news. Instead, you need a filter; a way of spotting and singling-out online content that looks untrustworthy. That’s what we call “critical thinking”.

Critical thinking consists of asking the “awkward questions” such as “Why is the person or organisation saying this?”, “Does it sound too good to be true?”. In our experience as fact checkers, it’s often possible to spot whether a story will turn out to be based on bad information simply by looking at and thinking about the claim.

For younger children, it helps to lay the foundations first: what are “facts” and “sources” and why do they matter? I like to start by asking a class one of the most powerful questions in journalism: how do you know that? Imagine you tell someone it is three o’clock and they ask you “how do you know that?” You’ll probably point to a clock on the wall, your watch or your phone. They are valid answers because they’re all sources for telling the time.

Then you develop the idea. So a clock is a source… but what happens when a clock is wrong? Some clocks run fast or slow; some run out of a battery; others can even be tampered with easily. What do you do if you think a clock might not be right? You might try and find a second source to back up or disprove what the clock is saying… and so on.

For older children, you can find examples of online content that is misleading or harmful: vaccine myths, money making scams, doctored images of celebrities brandishing the “perfect body”. Think about the clues that present themselves even before you even have to touch your keyboard. Teaching those critical thinking skills is just as important as the skills involved in actually checking whether something is true or false.

Training

We’ve worked with the Welsh Government to produce a misinformation training module for education practitioners. This short, online training aims to give practitioners a breadth of knowledge about how to tackle misinformation and support learners to effectively:

• understand what misinformation is, the different forms it can take and the harms it can cause
• learn the basic skills for checking sources of information, and what it means to be trustworthy and untrustworthy
• learn the key critical thinking questions you can ask about any claim to work out if it is likely to be true
• learn the process used by fact checkers to find out whether something is true or not