Let's think historically.
Is Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre an accurate representation
of an act of unpardonable British aggression or a clever piece of propaganda
designed to manipulate the public to support the revolution?
Was John Brown mentally ill or an
American patriot demanding that his country meet its stated values?
Like many questions, historical and otherwise,
to get an answer requires some good historical thinking.
Historical thinking requires that we move beyond reading sources to evaluating them.
We ask students not only to understand
the evidence, but to critique it.
When deciding how much credibility to give the source,
we ask students to consider the evidence it presents
and what the author is trying to accomplish.
We ask students to compare across sources to see where the truth might lie.
Assessing how well students think historically about sources
requires that we know what that thinking looks like.
And a fair assessment of historical thinking
requires that students actually be taught how to do it and that they're giving it a fair attempt,
that they're trying to do it.
Students are often more willing to think historically when they understand what it does for them,
when they see the payoff.
In the words of motivational writers, this is called relevance.
Luckily, the ability to evaluate historical sources has clear connections to students' current lives.
Let's start with an example.
Good historical thinking can prepare students for navigating the current media landscape,
a landscape that Kate Starbird the co-founder of The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington
recently described as "a perfect storm." It has the combination of we need basic information
about the novel coronavirus and its effects.
There's this fast moving social media communication going on,
and there are pre-existing fault lines in our society.
There are things we want to believe and things we are unwilling to believe.
Literally, the health of our students and our society is at risk.
Historical thinking can help.
In this presentation I'm going to work backwards.
I'm starting with the present and what we are learning about what it takes for students
to navigate the online world they increasingly inhabit.
I want to think about the present moment,
to use that to think how those same skills might be used in the service of historical thinking.
We'll start with considering the stance we want students to take towards information in general,
and historical information is no different.
Then I'll introduce the idea of confirmation bias
and how making students aware of confirmation bias can serve historical thinking.
Finally, I'll introduce the civic online reasoning process created by the good folks at Stanford University
and think about how civic online reasoning can serve students in a history class
and in their lives in the 21st century.
When reading historical sources, students often want to figure out
which documents are telling the truth in the search for the one right answer.
They're often looking for documents that communicate facts,
rather than the ones that they see as simply expressing an opinion.
This could be why documents that contain information, illustrations, photographs, or charts
are seen as more credible and being less open to manipulation.
They might look at Paul Revere's engraving and give it more credibility than it deserves
and be unwilling to compare it with the transcripts of the British soldiers.
I want students to understand that some facts are, in fact, better than others,
and I want students to see that some opinions are more informed than others.
And sometimes the opinions of a credible source might get more weight
than facts from a source I don't necessarily trust.
When determining which sources to trust, students often seek out pieces of inaccuracies.
They look for something that isn't quite right, and then they're willing to dismiss the entire part of the source.
I watched them say, "Well this wasn't true, therefore I can't trust the source."
I want students to understand that not all information is created equal.
Some information is created to manipulate and to divide.
Other information is simply mistakes made by someone who is actually seeking to inform, who is well intentioned.
I want students to ask why that source was written,
what the intention was behind it.
Intention is hard to figure out, but intention matters,
and I want students to know that.
Students might seek to locate bias in a source,
and if they find it, they tend to dismiss that source.
I want them to understand that bias, something that we might just as well call point of view,
exists in all sources, that bias exists everywhere.
However it can cause them to say that no source can be trusted
once they see that bias exists everywhere,
and that too is dangerous.
To counter this tendency, to distrust everything, I try to communicate
that bias isn't just something out there in sources. It exists within me. It exists within them.
Rather than try to eliminate bias, we seek to help it to inform our judgments,
to make our judgments better.
In short, I find Paul Adams metaphor of information pollution really helpful
when helping students think about sources.
Like pollution in the physical world it's important to know that information pollution is there,
but just the fact that it is there does not put us off from all sources.
We have to be on the lookout.
But we don't give up on sources, just because things are biased.
In the physical world, for example, we're on the lookout for dirty water. We shouldn't drink it,
we don't want to wash it, and there's all kinds of reasons to avoid it.
There's things there
we don't want to encounter. However, that
doesn't put us off from drinking and using water at all.
And it's similar from trusted sources.
They trust sources that are trying to not deceive are sources that we might want to give more credibility
than sources whose intent is to pollute the atmosphere.
So let's think about the question of bias.
Teaching students about confirmation bias can help them as they try to learn to evaluate sources.
Confirmation bias is, again borrowing from Paul Adams words,
"The tendency to under scrutinize-- to look for reasons to except-
accept, sorry,-- claims and ideas with which we agree
and to over scrutinize-- or look for reasons to dismiss-- claims and ideas that conflict with existing beliefs."
Because people today and in the past are more willing to trust sources that confirm our beliefs,
we can be subject to manipulation by those who would mislead us.
When we understand this, when we understand confirmation bias,
it can teach us the past holds the possibility to teach us humility,
a willingness to admit that we might be wrong,
a willingness to note that we might not see everything and that people in the past were also subject to this same confirmation bias.
This attitude is key when helping people learn to think historically.
Understanding confirmation bias can push us to try and understand our own biases
and to put information that confirms to them to greater scrutiny.
Seeing confirmation bias within ourselves can push us to explore and look beyond the obvious or common sense
and can help us understand why people in the past had to deal with these same kinds of issues.
Looking at times when people were manipulated through sources of the day can help us understand that
misinformation and fake news aren't new phenomenon.
And looking at what we can do to prevent being deceived in the present
can help students think about the ways people might have been misled in the past.
I'm taking the approach of starting with the present and making the leap to applying techniques,
current techniques, to the past.
I'm doing this in the hopes of increasing the relevance of historical thinking skills surrounding the use of evaluating primary sources.
Students typically spend a lot of time online, so I'm starting there.
Most of us were taught to evaluate online sources by spending time in the source
and for looking for things such as the domain name, is it a is it an org or a gov.
We look for an affiliation with the university. We try to decide if the source can be trusted.
But we're starting to realize that this method is time consuming,
it's subject to manipulation by the people creating the source,
and, probably most importantly, students don't do it, and pretty much we don't do it either.
One of my favorite fake news sites is the site featuring the northwest endangered tree octopus.
Just a tip from the start, there is no such thing as a northwest tree octopus,
as much as I wish that was the case.
But you'll never know it by looking at this site.
I've pasted some of the features of the site here that are designed to deceive the reader,
and do so quite effectively.
Here's some things I'd like you to notice:
Notice the use of photos and graphics, and as we talked about earlier,
these increase the likelihood that students are going to believe this source.
The links, although you can't click on them, these links there are links to reputable sites,
they sort of ride the coattails of the reputable at-
of the credibility, sorry, of other sites to suggest credibility of their own sites.
All links on this site actually work. They're maintained, and they take you someplace usually within the same site.
There's a disclaimer here that lends an air of respectability,
suggesting that they are warning us about what to watch for.
This is ironic and pretty sophisticated because it has the opposite effect.
Who would warn me about things I should
watch out for if I need to actually watch out for things?
When students were asked to evaluate this site,
in fact, most find it reliable.
So what do we do?
The folks who brought you the Stanford History Education Project have been looking at how
fact checkers decide if they can trust a source.
From this research they developed this thing they call the civic online reasoning.
I think civic online reasoning, when understood well, is a nice introduction, a nice way into evaluating historical sources
that students can use fairly readily and
adapt for lots of age levels.
Civic online reasoning has three parts,
questions we ask when we're trying to
decide if information is polluted.
They ask, who is behind the information?
We ask, what evidence is being used?
We ask, what do other sources say?
Key to civic online reasoning is a willingness to leave the source before you've invested too much time in it.
Instead of spending time pouring over the source,
You read what they- You do what they call reading laterally.
That is we go to other sources to find information about this source.
Just parenthetically, I hope you can see the connection to historical reasoning
when we're asking them to compare sources we want them to understand it,
but we also want them to develop the disposition to go to other sources.
And here going to other sources turns out to be what will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
In the case of the northwest tree octopus,
if we do a search, and we don't go back to that site,
we find a couple of places that that immediately throws suspicion on the source.
The Library of Congress identifies the site as an internet hoax.
Wikipedia, drawing directly from the Library of Congress, does the same.
On the Library of Congress site,
we learned that Lyle Zapato is behind the information.
On other sites, we learned that it's possible to send money to Mr Zapato
to support this endangered creature.
Knowing that the site is a hoax helps me look at the evidence that's being used.
I start to see the way the links to other information have nothing to do with the northwest tree octopus
and that those sites don't mention this fictional animal at all.
It's easier for me to recognize the sleight of hand.
How does this relate to historical thinking?
I'm suggesting that teaching students this, the civic online reasoning process
can provide a rationale for why we're asking them
to spend the time slogging through sources.
And it might increase students 
disposition to do the work of comparing sources,
looking at what the sources have to say about each other,
a place where I tend to find students being resistant.
And when we can actually get them to do it
and we know what it is we're looking for
and we've taught them how to do it,
it's easier to assess,
and our assessments are more likely to have validity.
And it can't hurt when they encounter social media claims that might put them and our society at risk.
