Here’s the thing: Kids today are growing up in a world of ceaseless communication. They – like the rest of us – are on the receiving end of an overwhelming amount of information, transmitted in huge helpings and in a virtual instant.
But not all information is of the same quality or veracity. Much of it, in fact, falls far short of the standards we’d like our students to learn and live by. Our aim is to help them learn to be smart consumers of information, not to accept it at face value; to dig for facts using the Internet, not to stop looking once they get to Wikipedia; and to weigh evidence logically, not to draw conclusions based on their own biases.
This is what we offer:
• Many of our Lesson Plans are topical, presenting students with a message, such as an actual political or product advertisement, and guiding them through a process of discovery leading to the facts. Another group of lessons teaches some of the core concepts of reasoning, giving students the building blocks to help them parse others’ arguments and strengthen their own. Using clips from Monty Python and other popular films and television programs, our lessons explain deductive versus inductive reasoning, how to pick out logical fallacies, the power of visual rhetoric and similar tools of critical thinking.
• Resources is our go-to directory of Web sites, including synopses of what they offer. Official government sites can be terrific fonts of facts. So can think tanks and issue advocacy groups; we give rundowns on their political leanings and reliability.
• Our Dictionary helps decode bureaucratese as well as legal, political, economic and other terms of art that often plague discussions of policy and politics.
• Tools of the Trade is a five-step framework for analyzing information and avoiding deception. That process is the essence of what we do at FactCheck.org, where we have been debunking false and misleading claims in politics since 2003.
• At Ask FactCheck, you can see our answers to questions about politics, government and current affairs submitted by users of this site and FactCheck.org. We have a particular focus on chain e-mails that readers send us – almost all of which are false.
The techniques we use at FactCheck.org, and those we try to convey here at FactCheckED.org, are essentially those used by any good investigator. We try to be skeptical but not cynical. We neither accept claims at face value nor do we assume them to be false. We listen carefully, look for evidence and weigh that against what’s being said or implied. We think those are good habits to teach anybody.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center
Brooks Jackson
Director, FactCheck.org
