Via Stanford – November 22, 2016 – By Brooke Donald – “Education scholars say youth are duped by sponsored content and don’t always recognize political bias of social messages. When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education. The report, released this week by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from. “Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there,” said Professor Sam Wineburg, the lead author of the report and founder of SHEG. “Our work shows the opposite to be true.” The researchers began their work in January 2015, well before the most recent debates over fake news and its influence on the presidential election. The scholars tackled the question of “civic online reasoning” because there were few ways to assess how students evaluate online information and to identify approaches to teach the skills necessary to distinguish credible sources from unreliable ones. The authors worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish…”