Critical Thinking: News and Media Literacy

Who decides what information you see and what you know? It's not who you think!

Disinformation is false or misleading information that is shared deliberately to cause harm. Learn about how disinformation producers use knowledge of human emotions and technology to spread disinformation.

To combat false and misleading information, it useful to recognize the different forms it can take. Here are five common varieties of mis and disinformation to look out for.

When anyone can post anything online, the result is a lot of information. To understand the problem of false and misleading information, it helps to define and categorize it.

This video provides five tips that can help you spot fake news and weed out the real from the completely made up. Below the synopsis is a link to an article with more information.

The student version of Ctrl-F has videos and activities for students to learn how to evaluate information. Use this site in conjunction with the resources from the main Ctrl-F site. Requires free account

How can you ask the most powerful questions, in order to unlock an even wider universe of knowledge? And why is the choosing of a simple word (like "How" or "Why") the key to your greatest quest and your greatest question?

This 2-minute video has tips for students that are reading information or doing research online.

This is a tip sheet designed to help parents help their kids do homework and research online. Find (reliable) information more effectively.

This tip sheet outlines three ways to make sure that you have good information about important topics. Check against other sources. Get outside your bubble. Go to the source.

Did you know that almost a quarter of adults have shared a false news story? This is a great new resource with advice on how to identify hoaxes and other false content.

This guide from MediaSmarts provides three tips for being a critical reader, and sharer, of online news.

This guide offers tips for dealing with life online once you are in college or university. The guide is divided into four sections: surviving school, money management, online relationships and taking care of yourself.

This is a collection of engaging "missions" during which students read a story on a social network feed; the story might be entirely true, entirely false, or somewhere in between.

The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.

In medicine, there’s often a disconnect between news headlines and the scientific research they cover. While headlines are designed to catch attention, many studies produce meaningful results when they focus on a narrow, specific question. So how can you figure out what’s a genuine health concern and what’s less conclusive?

Statistics can be very persuasive in an argument. But any set of statistics might have something lurking inside it that can turn the results completely upside down.

Samantha Agoos describes a 5-step process that may help you make the best decision when faced with any kind of problem.

Here are five questions that you can ask about a news article that you are reading. These tips will help you to find authentic and reliable information.

Test your wits with a set of hypothetical health studies and find out just how good you are at spotting clickbait.

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we’ve spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach?

Socrates, one of the founding fathers of Western philosophical thought, was on trial. Many believed he was an enemy of the state, butt Socrates wasn’t feared for claiming to have all the answers, but rather, for asking too many questions.

Humans aren't rational creatures, but the folks at 'Social Good Now' have some ideas for what we can do about it.