Early Childhood Education: Library Tutorials: Evaluation: Lateral reading

Learning objectives

You will be able to:

1. Understand why lateral reading is an important step to take before reading new information
2. Practice lateral reading as an evaluation technique

We are bombarded with information all the time, and not only from our phones. Everywhere we look there is information to take in, or to pass over.

Take a moment to think of all the places you got information from just today. For example:

• the weather on the radio
• a calendar alert on your phone
• personal news from a friend's text
• an article or headline on a social media app
• an announcement in Talon.

You could go on and on with this list! Because of this huge volume of information that demands our attention, it makes sense that we have all come up with ways to cope.

One of the ways our minds cope with information overload is to automatically filter out information that doesn't seem to be relevant at the time, and at the same time focus in on things that do seem important or urgent. Media creators and platforms take advantage of this tendency by making certain headlines seem very urgent or outrageous, triggering our interest, sympathy, disgust, or outrage. These automatic reactions we have make it even more difficult to sort out what's likely to be a reliable source from what's likely to be unreliable. 

Look back on the sources of information you listed above. Looking back, which of these are likely to be reliable, and which are likely to be unreliable? How do you know?

Did you find it difficult to to describe why you thought something was reliable or unreliable? If so, you're not alone. Many of us think we are pretty good at spotting bad (untrue, manipulative, misleading) information online. Unfortunately we are getting easier and easier to fool as technology improves and businesses battle for our valuable attention.

Because our time and attention are not infinite, we want to use them well and efficiently. The evaluation method called "lateral reading" takes only about 1 minute, and it gives us a good idea if a source is likely to be bias, false, or simply unreliable. Please note: lateral reading is not a substitute for deep analysis or "close reading". Instead it's designed to save us time and attention, and avoid the exhaustion of information overload. Watch each of the videos below to get an introduction to a very valuable, quick, and dependable method of determining the reliability of information we run across.

[Insert follow up reflection/check understanding]

Bonus information

If you'd like to keep learning more about simple methods of verifying online information, see the Kirkwood Library's video playlist on Information Evaluation:

Let's point out a few important things to keep in mind:

1. As the examples in the videos above showed us, lateral reading can:

• Quickly tell us if a site comes from a known "bad actor". That is, a person or organization that is trying to manipulate our attention, spread false information, or otherwise mislead us.
• Save us time in our research, so we spend less time trying to figure out if a source is potentially reliable.

2. You may wonder why we depend on Wikipedia for this step, when we've all heard how Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source of information. It's true that Wikipedia isn't an academic source. However, one thing Wikipedia is very good at is sharing information that is factual, and also sharing information about which there is a consensus. So if most knowledgeable people agree on something, that's the kind of information that will remain in a Wikipedia article. 

3. We are not using lateral reading to thoroughly evaluate the source, we're using it to get a sense of whether the source is likely to be bias or unreliable, so that we don't have to waste time with an in-depth evaluation. Wikipedia is perfect for this.

• Wikipedia will also quickly give us helpful information about a legitimate source. Recall the example in the video, where he found that a news article had been published in a well-known and legitimate news site. If you wanted to refer to that news article in your research, you would then go back to the article and take the next steps of thoroughly evaluating it. You'll find out about this in the next step of this tutorial.
• Wikipedia will also tell us if a journal is peer-reviewed. We will see in the next step that this information is also very useful in our in-depth evaluation of a source.