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Education

School librarians teach CRAAP to fight fake news

Nicole Higgins DeSmet
Burlington (Vt.) Free Press
Shannon Walters, Burlington High School librarian, teaches kids how to question what they see on the internet. The end goal: helping them identify fake news.

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Read any fake news lately? School librarians have. And now they are teaching students CRAAP to help them evaluate and verify news content to ferret out the false from the real.

CRAAP, an acronym that stands for Currency (timeliness), Relevance (importance), Authority (source), Accuracy (reliability) and Purpose (reason) helps students sort through the overwhelming flood of digital information.

"These are the questions we have to introduce these ideas to kids before they think they know everything," said Shannon Walters, Burlington High School librarian.

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"It used to be that we had to gather from a scarcity of resources. Now we have to help our students and our faculty navigate an overflow of information to determine what's the best resource to meet their needs," Walters said.

Students might be savvy about what type of image to post to Instagram versus Snapchat, but librarians in Chittenden County said that doesn't mean they can discern fake from real.

Under the CRAAP system, students evaluate the accuracy and validity of content by answering a list of questions. For instance, to verify the authority of the author of an article, students would ask:

• Who is the author/publisher/source/sponsor?

• Are the author's credentials or organizational affiliations given?

• What are the author's credentials or organizational affiliations?

• What are the author's qualifications to write on the topic?

• Is there contact information, such as a publisher or email address?

• Does the URL reveal anything about the author or source? Examples: .com .edu .gov .org .net

The famous "Helicopter Shark" photo is classic fakery, made by combining two real photos -- a shark breaching off the coast of South Africa with an Air Force photo taken in San Francisco Bay -- to create a spectacular yet completely false image. Shannon Walters uses this image to teach students how to critically examine an image to help verify what's real and what's not.

The battle for accuracy is older than broadband. School librarians have been working to educate students about online sourcing since the internet became popularized sometime after 1996. 

Information skills among high school students are not strong in the U.S. according to a 2016 study by Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University.

"[...] in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation," the Stanford study stated.

The study evaluated 7,000 college, middle and high school student answers to questions about online information.

They were asked to evaluate a page that contained, sponsored content, advertisements and news articles. They were also asked to assess an image and a tweet to see if they could accurately source the content. 

More than 80% of middle school students thought that “sponsored content,” was a real news story. Fewer than 20% of students questioned the source of a photo post containing a false report of mutated flowers from a nuclear power plant failure. 

A falsely attributed image used as an example in Stanford University's 2016 study,

President of the Vermont School Library Association and South Burlington's Orchard Elementary School Library Media and Instructional Technology Specialist Donna Sullivan-MacDonald pointed to the Stanford study to highlight the importance of digital learning.

She said she began working with 4th- and 5th-grade students about 20 years ago.  She used a guide by educator Kathy Schroke that taught students how to critically evaluate a website.

MacDonald, who uses a Common Sense Media program called Digital Passport, plans to incorporate it this fall with a new app from Google called: Internet Awesome, which she helped "Beta test" with her students last year. The free app uses games to get kids thinking about what makes the best password, how to behave online and how to sort real from fake information. 

These programs are in line with Vermont Department of Education's digital learning goals, which include empowering students to take an active role in their own education and developing responsible digital citizens. 

The Agency of Education's 2014 Quality Standards recommends that schools with over 300 students have at least "one full-time library media specialist and sufficient staff to implement a program that supports literacy, information and technology standards."

Burlington School District reduced in 2016 full-time library staff to help make up a $1.4 million deficit.

When the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in May re-accredited the high school it recommended the district add back a high school librarian/media specialist, which it did.

Teaching media literacy is different than checking material out, according to Walters, the incoming BHS librarian.

She explained that without a full-time librarian a library can become a space to get stuff instead of a place to make meaning: more of supermarket than a kitchen, Walters said, borrowing an analogy teacher librarian.

"We want students to come to conclusions that are not only true but personally meaningful and relevant," Walters said.

Follow Nicole Higgins DeSmet on Twitter: @NicoleHDeSmet

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