Sam Wineburg - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Sam Wineburg
Journal of Educational Psychology
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Educational Researcher, 2021
Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investi... more Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demograph...
Journal of American History, 2018
Phi Delta Kappan, 2018
In recent years — and especially since the 2016 presidential election — numerous media organizati... more In recent years — and especially since the 2016 presidential election — numerous media organizations, newspapers, and policy advocates have made efforts to help Americans become more careful consumers of the information they see online. In K-12 and higher education, the main approach has been to provide students with checklists they can use to assess the credibility of individual websites. However, the checklist approach is outdated. It would be far better to teach young people to follow the lead of professional fact-checkers: When confronted by a new and unfamiliar website, they begin by looking elsewhere on the web, searching for any information that might shed light on who created the site in question and for what purpose.
British Journal of Educational Psychology, 2019
Background. Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and polit... more 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 9 2 9 2 design (treatment condition 9 order 9 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.
Cognition and Instruction, 2018
This research was supported by the Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources program an... more This research was supported by the Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Contract No. 19308), Sam Wineburg, principal investigator. Although we acknowledge the generosity of our funders, we alone are responsible for the contents contained herein. We thank Rich Shavelson and Ed Haertel for their guidance in this work, and Jim Pellegrino for encouraging us not to give up on this paper until it reached publication. This research would never have gotten off the ground without the invaluable aid of Rob McEntarffer, Randy Ernst, and Teresa Wanser-Ernst. We thank them all.
Phi Delta Kappan, 2008
... Famous American Percentage Naming 1. Martin Luther King, Jr. 67 2. Rosa Parks 60 3. Harriet T... more ... Famous American Percentage Naming 1. Martin Luther King, Jr. 67 2. Rosa Parks 60 3. Harriet Tubman 44 4. Susan B. Anthony 34 5. Benjamin Franklin 29 6. Amelia Earhart 23 7. Oprah Winfrey 22 8. Marilyn Monroe 19 9. Thomas Edison 18 10. Albert Einstein 16 ...
Teaching and Teacher Education, 1998
This article reports on a professional development project that sought to establish a community o... more This article reports on a professional development project that sought to establish a community of learners among high school teachers. Teachers from the English and history departments at a large urban high school met twice a month for two-and-a-half years. Project activities included reading and discussing pieces of fiction and history, developing an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, and video-taping and viewing classroom instruction. Initial findings point to an enhanced collegiality among faculty within and across departments; reduced teacher isolation; and the development of an intellectual community for teachers within the high school. However, teachers at different points in their career trajectory were differentially affected by this project. Based on our preliminary findings, we offer implications for teacher induction and socialization, and ongoing professional development.
Center for the Study of …, 2000
In this paper, the authors draw on their experience with a professional development project to pr... more In this paper, the authors draw on their experience with a professional development project to propose a model for studying the formation and development of teacher community. The project they describe brought together 22 English and social ...
Journal of Educational Psychology
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Educational Researcher, 2021
Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investi... more Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demograph...
Journal of American History, 2018
Phi Delta Kappan, 2018
In recent years — and especially since the 2016 presidential election — numerous media organizati... more In recent years — and especially since the 2016 presidential election — numerous media organizations, newspapers, and policy advocates have made efforts to help Americans become more careful consumers of the information they see online. In K-12 and higher education, the main approach has been to provide students with checklists they can use to assess the credibility of individual websites. However, the checklist approach is outdated. It would be far better to teach young people to follow the lead of professional fact-checkers: When confronted by a new and unfamiliar website, they begin by looking elsewhere on the web, searching for any information that might shed light on who created the site in question and for what purpose.
British Journal of Educational Psychology, 2019
Background. Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and polit... more 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 9 2 9 2 design (treatment condition 9 order 9 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.
Cognition and Instruction, 2018
This research was supported by the Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources program an... more This research was supported by the Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Contract No. 19308), Sam Wineburg, principal investigator. Although we acknowledge the generosity of our funders, we alone are responsible for the contents contained herein. We thank Rich Shavelson and Ed Haertel for their guidance in this work, and Jim Pellegrino for encouraging us not to give up on this paper until it reached publication. This research would never have gotten off the ground without the invaluable aid of Rob McEntarffer, Randy Ernst, and Teresa Wanser-Ernst. We thank them all.
Phi Delta Kappan, 2008
... Famous American Percentage Naming 1. Martin Luther King, Jr. 67 2. Rosa Parks 60 3. Harriet T... more ... Famous American Percentage Naming 1. Martin Luther King, Jr. 67 2. Rosa Parks 60 3. Harriet Tubman 44 4. Susan B. Anthony 34 5. Benjamin Franklin 29 6. Amelia Earhart 23 7. Oprah Winfrey 22 8. Marilyn Monroe 19 9. Thomas Edison 18 10. Albert Einstein 16 ...
Teaching and Teacher Education, 1998
This article reports on a professional development project that sought to establish a community o... more This article reports on a professional development project that sought to establish a community of learners among high school teachers. Teachers from the English and history departments at a large urban high school met twice a month for two-and-a-half years. Project activities included reading and discussing pieces of fiction and history, developing an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum, and video-taping and viewing classroom instruction. Initial findings point to an enhanced collegiality among faculty within and across departments; reduced teacher isolation; and the development of an intellectual community for teachers within the high school. However, teachers at different points in their career trajectory were differentially affected by this project. Based on our preliminary findings, we offer implications for teacher induction and socialization, and ongoing professional development.
Center for the Study of …, 2000
In this paper, the authors draw on their experience with a professional development project to pr... more In this paper, the authors draw on their experience with a professional development project to propose a model for studying the formation and development of teacher community. The project they describe brought together 22 English and social ...