Teaching content in practice: Investigating rehearsals of social studies discussions.

Despite evidence of its benefits, discussion remains rare in history/social science classrooms. To address this problem, communities of teacher educators (TEs) have begun supporting novices to approximate discussion facilitation. Some scholars are concerned that this turn to practice will come at the cost of content preparation. Focusing specifically on rehearsals of discussion facilitation in three history/social science methods courses, our analysis investigates whether, how, and in what ways TEs worked on content while engaging novice teachers in practicing discussion facilitation. We found that TEs found ways to work simultaneously on content and practice during rehearsals of discussion facilitation.

Evidence of emergent practice: Teacher candidates facilitating historical discussions in their field placements.

•Teacher candidates can facilitate text-based discussion when prepared.•Instructional scaffolds can assist candidates in facilitating discussion.•Assignments, questioning sequences, and prepared materials can support enactment.•Candidates still struggle to connect discussion to lesson's learning goal.

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

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.

Improving university students' web savvy: An intervention study.

BACKGROUND: Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and political issues. However, they struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information they encounter online. AIMS: This pilot study investigated whether a focused curricular intervention could improve university students' ability to make sound judgements of credibility. SAMPLE: Participants (n = 67) were students in four sections of a 'critical thinking and writing' course at a university on the West Coast of the United States. Course sections were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 29) and control conditions (n = 38). METHODS: We conducted a pre-and-posttest, treatment/control experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 design (treatment condition × order × time) with repeated measures on the last factor. Students in the treatment group received two 75-min lessons on evaluating the credibility of online content. An assessment of online reasoning was administered to students 6 weeks prior to the intervention and again 5 weeks after. RESULTS: Students in the treatment group were significantly more likely than students in the control group to have shown gains from pretest to posttest. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that teaching students a small number of flexible heuristics that can be applied across digital contexts can improve their evaluation of online sources.