Abstract:

Nowadays the credibility of the news that we read online cannot be taken for granted. We have greater access than ever to all kind of information, including news that can be misleading or intentionally fake. Fake information is mainly spread through social media, making adolescents vulnerable to believe and share this news. In this context, helping students learn how to select the information that can be trusted becomes critical (Kendeou et al., 2019). Indeed, previous research on this topic shows that teenagers are prone to trust fake news (Wineburg et al., 2016), that they run into difficulty when they have to critically evaluate and interpret contradictory information, and that they do not usually receive training on these competences (Pérez et al., 2018).

The aim of this study is to provide secondary school students with some criteria to critically evaluate contradictory information. Specifically, we aim to find out whether they change the degree of credibility they give to a text containing fake information on a controversial topic and the arguments they provide to support their view after applying some criteria to critically analyse it. These criteria took the form of critical questions (Walton, 2016), which asked students to focus on, among others, the arguments contained in the news, the type of evidence provided, and the source of the evidence.

Participants were 96 students (14-15 years old) attending two secondary schools in Barcelona. First, they were asked to give their previous opinion on climate change, by assessing on a scale from 0 to 10 their agreement with the argument that humans were responsible for it. After that, they were given two texts with contradictory information on this topic to read: first, one including fake arguments and defending that climate change is produced by nature, and a second one offering different evidence on the human impact on this phenomenon. After reading each text, students were asked to assess the degree of credibility given to it, and their degree of agreement, both on a scale from 0 to 10, and to argue their position. After this, they were asked a series of critical questions that require them to compare the two texts on several features to help them evaluate what they had read. Finally, they had to assess the credibility of the text containing fake information again, and provide arguments to support their view.

The degree of credibility was transformed into three categories: No credibility = 0 to 4; Neutral = 5; Credibility= 6 to 10. We performed descriptive analyses and the Wilcoxon signed-rang test. The students' arguments provided were subjected to a content analysis.

Our results show that there was a significant change on the credibility attributed to the fake news after reading the second text and answering the critical questions (Z = -2.49; p = .013; 35.1% students did not believe the fake news initially; and 20.2% were neutral; while 50% did not believe it, and 10% were neutral after answering the questions).

The arguments provided by the students to support their perspective at the end of the task included some of the criteria implicit in the critical questions to refuse the validity of the fake news.

We conclude that asking students to compare two news on several aspects (e.g., nº of arguments, source and diversity of the evidences), may help them overcome their initial lack of critical analysis of the fake news.

Keywords:

Fake news, critical questions, critical thinking, argumentation.