FNF Plugin #2: "Thoughtful" Lateral Search

Lesson Plan

Learning Targets

I can use the Fake News Fitness plugin to analyze the content of a page.
I can make a evidentiary judgement about whether to trust a page's claims

Outline

NOTE: Your second use of the Fake News Fitness plugin is to make a "detailed" judgement about the page, which includes reading the content and looking at other pages on the website and on other websites that evaluate this site.

Find an article to evaluate and click the red F/N button.
On the Actions tab, switch from "Default" to "Detailed" and Save/Reload
Note which Section 1 Tab form fields are filled, and what they mean.
Fill any empty Section 1 form fields with what you can pull from the page.
Switch to the Section 2 Tab and complete the fields explained in the section below.
Use the Section 3 / Actions Tab make judgements and add your Trust Rank to the page.
Save to Google Drive, or copy/paste to a Word doc.
Share the doc with a teacher, or copy/paste the data into an assignment.
Discuss your experiences and questions with the class.

Stanford Civic Online Reasoning: Resources on Lateral Reading

New Data and Options in the "Thoughtful" Lateral Search Form Version

Section 1: No New Fields

This entire section "should" be automatically filled when you visit the page. However, some pages are coded differently. You'll want to make sure there's something in each field.

If Page Type is blank, describe what this is: Advertiser Content, News Article, Report, Satire, Scholarly Article , Social Media Post or Technical Article, Medical Study, Research ...

If there is no Author Link, you should find the best page you can about the Author (if one is listed) to determine whether you'd trust what that person says.

The one judgement you should make on this page is whether the headline / title matches the content. If not, it's a "clickbait" headline.

Section 2: All New Fields

This section requires you to find the "lede" paragraph or abstract from this article and paste it, and also do some "lateral searching".

The page may make more than one "claim", so whichever claim is most important to you, paste that. If there IS a claim, include the link(s) the article gives to evidence for that claim. Ignore if this is a "summary" article that doesn't make a particular claim.

If there's an "About Us" page, paste the link and the summary. Also find an external source for the reputation of this website, and paste the link and summary.

Last, rate the bias of the article itself, as it seems to be to you. Is it written neutrally?

Section 3 & Actions: Judgement Fields

This is where you put the Trust and Mistrust Markers that had been in Section 2 in the "Surface" form, and where you assign a "Trust Rank" to the page

You should also identify 1-2 main reasons for that Trust Rank assignment.

Questions for later could be questions for yourself (when you come back to this) or for others who might comment on your work.

If you are submitting this for an assignment, it is also a good idea to save it to your personal drive - whether Google Drive or OneDrive - because if you are using this article for some kind of report or project, you'll want to refer back to the work you've done here.

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