Please note: This page contains instructions that are intended for the course instructor only. Instructors, please be sure to delete or unpublish this page after reading it.

Module Pages

Contact your subject librarian (Links to an external site.) if you have any questions over the material covered in this module.

This module was adapted by Kevin Adams from a module originally created by Civic Online Reasoning.

Module Quiz

Students will take an assessment at the end of the module. The statistics will be reported to Kevin. Please encourage students to take this quiz. If you want to check to make sure that they did, you can ask them for the password they receive upon completing the evaluation: LateralReadingComplete

As a part of the active learning for this module, students will fill out a couple of questionnaires as they practice lateral reading. Here are the questions that they will fill out. I ask the students to save their documents, in case you would like to have them turn them in in class. Below each document is a summary of what I hope they will find and write in each.

Wikipedia Practice Lateral Reading - Resources & Practice - Student Materials.docx

The Wikipedia article on the Denver Guardian says that it “was a fake news website, known for a popular untrue story about Hillary Clinton posted on the site on November 5, 2016, three days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Wikipedia’s references include established sources like Vox, the New York Times, NPR, and the Denver Post, which back up Wikipedia’s claim that the Denver Guardian is a fake news site.

Fact Checking Practice - Resources & Practice - Student Materials.docx

Brookings Institute: Brookings is a research group, or think tank (the oldest in the nation), that conducts research on economics, policy, and global issues. Experts in different policy areas conduct research and write reports for Brookings. It is sometimes viewed as liberal, but it is the most frequently cited think tank in the media and cited almost as often by conservative-leaning news outlets as liberal-leaning outlets.
Center for Immigration Studies: CIS is a research organization that advocates for much less immigration to the U.S. Its anti-immigration stance makes it controversial; for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled CIS a “hate group” because it “attack[s] or malign[s] an entire class of people” (immigrants). However, PolitiFact reported that it found the “hate group” designation “based on some of its associations rather than its current work.” In any case, CIS has a strong anti-immigration stance.

Please be sure to delete or unpublish this page after you have finished preparing the module for use in your class.