Supporting EAL Secondary Students in Thinking Critically about Online Information

Abstract

Evaluating the credibility of online information, a key component of digital literacy, is challenging for secondary students because they often rely on superficial strategies that do little to help them differentiate between information and disinformation. For example, our research has shown that students are prone to believe sites that appear professional but are in fact of a more nefarious nature (e.g., fake news sites designed to intentionally deceive). For this Description of Classroom Practices report, we describe a series of six lessons that we designed with secondary EAL teachers that help students think critically about online information while supporting their growth as additional language learners. We found that the lessons helped students evaluate the credibility of online sources holistically by evaluating within and across content, source, and context. After reporting the students’ overall positive comments about the materials, we describe their favourite activity in more detail with scaffolding suggestions.