Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak. ~ Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning, Stanford History Education Group
School librarians have always been important. Whether it is teaching research skills, finding just-right books for reluctant readers, or showing teachers databases to help them with classroom projects, librarians are indispensable resources to their school communities.
However, at no time has the need for school librarians been greater than at this moment.
According to a recent Stanford University study, 88 percent of middle-school students tested could not distinguish between an ad labeled "sponsored" content and a genuine news story on the web. With the recent proliferation of "fake news" on the Internet and on social media sites such as Facebook, this is startling.
While school administrators and teachers may be aware of the need for instruction about evaluating what news is "real" and what isn't, they are crunched for time and may not be able to add one more task to a day already packed with instruction.
That's where school librarians come in.
Library media specialists are trained to help students find the richest resources that go beyond a Google search. They teach website evaluation so that when students venture out into the Wild West world of the Internet, they know how to tell a genuine website from a fake.
And with ten years of experience in a newsroom of one of the largest newspapers in New England, I am able to pass along the critical thinking skills I learned to my students to prepare them for the future.
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