The Internet teems with websites seeking to advance specific political agendas while concealing their true intent, identity, or backers. These sites often have high production values and the trappings of legitimacy (e.g., boards of directors, links to academic studies, even 501(c)(3) status). In this digital task, students are asked to evaluate such a website.

The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

When we have a question or are searching for sources, we likely turn to a search engine to help us find answers. We often click on the first result—perhaps because sifting through all the results takes time, or because we assume the first result is the most trustworthy. But the first result is not always the best place to start. Spending a little more time scanning search results can help us make a more informed choice about where to go first.

This lesson introduces students to click restraint, a strategy that involves resisting the urge to immediately click on the first search result. Instead, students scan the results to make a more informed choice about where to go first.

This collection of lessons represent adapted and remixed instructional content for teaching media literacy and specifically civic online reasoning through distance learning. These lessons take students through the steps necessary to source online content, verify evidence presented, and corroborate claims with other sources.

The original lesson plans are the work of Stanford History Education Group, licensed under CC 4.0. Please refer to the full text lesson plans at Stanford History Education Group’s, Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum for specifics regarding background, research findings, and additional curriculum for teaching media literacy in the twenty-first century.

Claims and evidence flow rapidly and with relative freedom online. We aid in the spread of misinformation if we don’t ensure that a claim or evidence is accurate before we share it. Luckily, the Internet also allows us to check claims and evidence by consulting other sources. Although verifying claims and evidence takes time, it’s an important habit to develop to ensure that the information we read, use, and share is reliable and accurate. This lesson introduces students to the importance of checking what other sources say.

This lesson introduces students to the importance of corroborating arguments and verifying information across multiple online sources. Students practice corroborating claims and evidence presented in sources about mandatory Saturday school.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Who's Behind the Information? and Intro to What's the Evidence? Saturday School lessons.

We must be able to analyze evidence in order to effectively evaluate online information. In this lesson, students practice evaluating evidence that is presented in three online arguments about mandatory Saturday school.

This lesson is designed to be taught following the Intro to Who's Behind the Information? Saturday School lesson.

Since information is always influenced by its author, analyzing who's behind the information should be a priority when evaluating online content. But too often, students attempt to evaluate information based on elements other than the source, such as the contents of a website, its appearance, or the evidence it supplies. In this lesson, students learn why the source of information is so important and practice analyzing information based on who's behind it.

Without learning to investigate who is behind information online, we risk being taken in by sources and arguments that are more complicated or conflicted than we realize. In this lesson, students read arguments about mandatory Saturday school as an introduction to the importance of investigating who is behind information and how a source’s motivation could affect what it presents.

Students often assume that websites ending in .edu are always reliable, while those ending in .com are automatically suspect. This lesson will challenge some of the assumptions that students commonly make about websites based on their top-level domains and provide a chance for students to practice using the clues that domains provide.

When evidence takes the form of statistics, infographics, or other data presentations, it can be particularly tempting to accept it without fully evaluating whether it is reliable and relevant to the claims being made. This lesson builds on the “Intro to What is the evidence?” lesson and offers students specific practice in evaluating the relevance and reliability of data evidence.

This lesson gives students a chance to practice evaluating varied forms of data as evidence. Students discuss why data and infographics can be particularly tricky to evaluate, and then work in groups to evaluate several examples of online evidence.

Wikipedia contains a vast supply of information and is the 5th most trafficked website in the world. Still, it continues to be a controversial site, and many teachers advise students against using it. If students learn to use Wikipedia wisely, it can be a powerful resource for lateral reading, verifying claims, a starting point for research, and a springboard to more resources.

This lesson introduces students to Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, which requires article authors to provide reliable citations to support any claims they make. By following these citations, students can verify the claims in Wikipedia and locate a variety of reliable resources with which to continue their research.

Photographs and other images circulate rapidly online and are often gripping, persuasive forms of evidence. It is difficult to tell if these images accurately depict what their posters claim they do, and it is often tempting to take these images at face value. If we trust images without verifying their accuracy, we risk believing false claims and narratives.

This lesson introduces students to a strategy for learning more about online images: the reverse image search. Students can use this tool to learn more about an image, including where else it has been posted online and what (if any) stories have been written about it. Students practice this strategy in groups, using the Internet to learn more about a single image posted within it.

Evidence presented via video is becoming an increasingly popular way to make political arguments online. However, videos can be especially challenging to evaluate effectively. Too often, we are convinced by what we see (or think we see) and do not carefully consider how the video could be edited, distorted or misrepresent its subject. This lesson helps students practice analyzing video evidence and debunks the myth that if it's on video, it must be true.

This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source. Students watch the teacher model lateral reading and then have a chance to practice the strategy to determine who is behind a website and, ultimately, whether that website is trustworthy.

Lateral reading is challenging, and an approach that may work for one type of source might not work for another. This lesson is designed to provide students with the opportunity to practice lateral reading with a variety of sources.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

When trying to determine who is behind online information, students may be inclined to read vertically—to make judgments based on features internal to a website like its URL, design, functionality, or content. However, these features are not effective ways to evaluate a site and need to be explicitly challenged. This lesson asks students to evaluate a website and a post on social media by engaging in both vertical and lateral reading to see how they compare.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

Once students have completed the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson, they need opportunities to practice the strategy and develop flexible approaches for using it. This lesson is designed to provide students with focused practice reading laterally with articles from fact-checking organizations. Students are briefly introduced to fact-checking organizations and then practice reading laterally about a website using a fact-checking site.