This lesson provides students with opportunities to practice reading laterally with news stories. This lesson is designed to be taught following the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

In order to navigate news effectively, students need to understand how the genre of an article affects its reliability. Editors of reputable publications hold news articles and opinion pieces to different standards, and savvy readers consider these differences when evaluating online information. This lesson will teach students how news articles and opinion pieces differ.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to continue practicing click restraint, a strategy that involves resisting the urge to immediately click on a result and instead scanning the page to make a more informed choice about where to click first. In this lesson, students learn how to analyze the search engine results page in order to make hypotheses about the kinds of sources and information generated in response to the search terms.

This lesson serves as an extension to the Click Restraint lesson. We suggest you teach that lesson before this one.

Social media is designed to allow users to freely post claims and evidence. Though this can make social media a powerful source of information, it also means that we must learn to verify sources, arguments, and evidence that are presented before we decide they are trustworthy. Different posts may require different approaches to verification, and the more flexible we are in deploying these strategies the less likely we are to be deceived by a misleading post.

This lesson will help students develop and practice methods for verifying sources, arguments, and evidence presented on social media.