Teaching lateral reading: Interventions to help people read like fact checkers

Abstract

People need more support learning to evaluate the credibility of online information. This article reviews recent research on interventions designed to teach lateral reading, the strategy of leaving an unfamiliar website to search for information about a source's credibility via additional sources. Interventions that use diverse designs to teach lateral reading and target participants in elementary school through adulthood have shown evidence of improving participants' digital evaluations. These interventions suggest that targeted and explicit instruction in lateral reading can help people both assess credible information and identify misinformation. Still, much more work is needed in a wider range of contexts to probe the design elements, duration, and teacher education needed to support successful interventions.

Keywords: Digital media literacy; Educational intervention; Lateral reading; Misinformation.