Ask the Right Questions¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Before hitting "share," learners interrogate a source with a compact question set: Who made this? How was it made? Why was it made? When was it made? What is it missing? Where do I go from here? The strategy draws on WNYC's On the Media "Breaking News Consumer's Handbook" and NewseumED's Believe It Or Not? lesson, which walk teachers and learners through basic news literacy using real online sources.

Design Implications¶

Teaching learners to ask structured provenance questions converts an amorphous disposition ("be skeptical") into a repeatable procedure, which matters because even college students struggle to evaluate digital information reliably [Breakstone et al., 2021 [+S]]. The questions work by directing attention to source identity, purpose, and omission — the features that most reliably discriminate credible from manipulated content — rather than surface cues like design polish, which novices over-weight [Wineburg & McGrew, 2019 [+S]].

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A short, memorable question list (the six "consumer questions" or the handbook's guidelines)
• A supply of authentic online sources — including deliberately questionable ones — for practice
• Time for learners to apply the questions to live examples, not just hear them (Class Discussion)

Constraints¶

• Question checklists applied mechanically can produce false confidence: learners who answer the six questions superficially may still miss manipulated content, because expert fact-checkers rely on lateral reading (leaving the page to check the source) rather than on-page inspection alone [Wineburg & McGrew, 2019 [~S]]
• Requires prior critical-reading skill and attention to detail; learners with weak background knowledge of media institutions may not know what a satisfying answer to "Who made this?" looks like
• Effectiveness drops when all practice examples are obviously fake or obviously credible — learners need mixed, ambiguous cases to calibrate judgment

Implementation Variability¶

• Use the six consumer questions as a whole-class protocol, or distribute them as roles in small-group evaluation tasks
• Adapt the question set to a domain: scientific claims ("Who funded this study?"), images ("Where did this photo first appear?"), or social posts ("Is this account what it claims to be?")
• Pair with lateral-reading practice: after asking the on-page questions, learners open new tabs to verify the source before concluding

Target Learners¶

• Secondary and post-secondary students encountering social media news feeds as primary information sources [Breakstone et al., 2021 [+S]]
• General adult audiences; the question set is deliberately jargon-free and works without prior media training
• Weakest fit for learners who already have strong fact-checking habits, for whom the checklist adds little beyond what they do spontaneously [Wineburg & McGrew, 2019 [~M]]

Target Learning Goals¶

• Source evaluation: judging credibility, provenance, and purpose of online information
• Critical thinking dispositions: habitual verification before sharing
• Media literacy: recognizing how format, funding, and framing shape a message

Instructions¶

1. Introduce the six consumer questions with a brief worked demonstration on a live article, thinking aloud at each question.
2. Model lateral reading as a seventh move: leave the page to answer "Who made this?" rather than trusting the site's own About page [Wineburg & McGrew, 2019 [+S]].
3. Have learners apply the full question set to a mixed set of sources in pairs, recording evidence for each answer.
4. Convene a Class Discussion to compare verdicts on ambiguous sources and surface disagreements about what counts as a sufficient answer.
5. Ask learners to write a one-paragraph verdict (share / don't share / needs verification) with justification, transferring the protocol to independent judgment.

Related Strategies¶

• Lateral Reading — the expert fact-checking move that complements on-page questioning; teach them together
• Case Studies — real viral misinformation cases give the questions authentic stakes
• Teach differentiated trust in knowledge sources as part of the social-institutional dimension of science education

Examples¶

• WNYC On the Media's "Breaking News Consumer's Handbook" (onthemedia.org) — a one-page set of guidelines for vetting breaking news, usable as the classroom handout.
• NewseumED "Believe It Or Not?" lesson — a structured lesson walking learners through evaluating news stories with the six consumer questions.
• Stanford History Education Group civic online reasoning curriculum (sheg.stanford.edu) — classroom tasks in which students evaluate real tweets, images, and websites; the evaluation questions embed the same provenance logic.

Key Sources¶

• Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1–40. doi:10.1177/016146811912101102
• Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2021). Students' civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 50(8), 505–515. doi:10.3102/0013189X211017495
• McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The challenge that's bigger than fake news: Civic reasoning in a social media environment. American Educator, 41(3), 4–9.