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Lateral Reading: Fact Checking, Information Evaluation, & Lateral Reading

Resources & Tutorials

Moving on to more complete evaluation methods

In the past, evaluation of web resources was taught using C.R.A.P. or S.T.A.A.R., ABC's, or other acronyms that encouraged the researcher to analyze the page you found.  It encouraged you to look at the URL (.com vs. .gov or .org) and to click the About page to find who was behind the information and web page. You were encouraged to evaluate the relevancy, accuracy, and authority.  This method still has some merit, but now researchers need to do more work to find and evaluate quality sources. 

Bad sites are getting crafty and hiding behind a pretty facade that checks the original boxes but is hiding bad content.  The new method of researching and evaluating is called "Lateral Reading." When using this method, a researcher will evaluate a website and its information by opening up more tabs in their browser, searching for more information about the site, and look for what others say about the page.  Using lateral reading you should go broad, not deep, and see what many other sites say about the specific website or owners of the page.  

Lateral Reading for Checking Facts (video tutorial)

Check out this 3-minute video from University Libraries at the University of Louisville to learn about lateral reading of websites as an approach used by fact checkers to evaluating news sources. The key message is to move throughout the Web to assess the website in question. Do not rely solely on the content or links of the website itself ("vertical reading"). 

 

Creative Commons License CC by NC 4.0

Citizen Literacy was created by Robert Detmering, Amber Willenborg, and Terri Holtze for University of Louisville Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Great Fact Checking Sites

AdFontas Media BIas Chart

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