Discussing Credibility and Corroboration: Students’ Reasoning About Digital Sources and Claims During Lateral Reading Lessons

As concerns about digital misinformation proliferate, scholars have evaluated a range of interventions to support people to detect misinformation and identify credible sources. One approach involves teaching lateral reading—opening new browser tabs to search for more information about the credibility of a source or the accuracy of its claims via additional credible sources. We investigated students’ reasoning as they discussed how they researched the credibility of sources or corroborated the accuracy of claims during an intervention in which both these processes were introduced as lateral reading. Our results suggest that judging source credibility and verifying the accuracy of claims involve different reasoning processes that deserve to be taught separately to prepare students to find credible information online.