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Given the current threat posed by toxic digital content, preparing students to evaluate online sources cannot be relegated to a single subject area--this instruction should happen across the curriculum. This article focuses on materials designed to teach students to evaluate online information across subject areas. ninth-grade biology and world geography teachers taught a series of curriculum-embedded lessons based on the following design principles: (a) Focus on a core question and strategy; (b) engage students in evaluating real online content; (c) feature cognitive apprenticeship and formative assessment; and (d) support teacher learning. We examine whether these lessons helped students become more skilled evaluators of online content. Pretest/posttest data (N =574) showed statistically significant growth in students' ability to evaluate the credibility of online content. We analyze the role played by the curriculum design principles in this interdisciplinary intervention and explore implications for future initiatives.

In a study conducted across an urban school district, we tested a classroom-based intervention in which students were taught online evaluation strategies drawn from research with professional fact checkers. Students practiced the heuristic of "lateral reading": leaving an unfamiliar website to search the open Web before investing attention in the site at hand. Professional development was provided to high school teachers who then implemented six 50-minute lessons in a district-mandated government course. Using a matched control design, students in treatment classrooms (n = 271) were compared to peers (n = 228) in regular classrooms. A multilevel linear mixed model showed that students in experimental classrooms grew significantly in their ability to judge the credibility of digital content. These findings inform efforts to prepare young people to make wise decisions about the information that darts across their screens.

The ability to find credible information online is necessary for informed civic engagement in the 21st century. This need is particularly acute for young people, who often turn to the Internet to learn about social and political issues. Preparing students to evaluate online content, particularly as it concerns social and political issues, aligns with broader efforts to reinvigorate the civic mission of colleges and universities. We analyzed how college students (n= 263) evaluated online sources about public policy issues. Results showed that a majority employed ineffective strategies for evaluating digital information. Many of the strategies students used mirrored advice found on college and university websites. These findings suggest a need to reconsider post-secondary approaches to teaching online evaluation strategies.

Are today's students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to "disseminate factual reports" on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization's ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website's home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided "strong evidence" of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website's "look," its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study's sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.

Since the November 2016 presidential election, coverage of "fake news" has been everywhere. It's hard to turn on the TV without hearing the term. Google and Facebook have pitched plans for fighting the menace. State legislators have even introduced bills to mandate K-12 instruction on the topic. Fake news is certainly a problem. Sadly, however, it's not our biggest. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact can help us detect canards invented by enterprising Macedonian teenagers, but the Internet is filled with content that defies labels like "fake" or "real." Determining who's behind information and whether it's worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy. Today's students are more likely to learn about the world through social media than through traditional sources like print newspapers. It's critical that students know how to evaluate the content that flashes on their screens. Unfortunately, research conducted by the Stanford History Education Group demonstrates they don't. In this article, the authors describe three of their assessments. Their findings are troubling. Yet they believe that gauging students' ability to evaluate online content is the first step in figuring out how best to support them.

Given the current threat posed by toxic digital content, preparing students to evaluate online sources cannot be relegated to a single subject area—this instruction should happen across the curriculum. This article focuses on materials designed to teach students to evaluate online information across subject areas. ninth-grade biology and world geography teachers taught a series of curriculum-embedded lessons based on the following design principles: (a) Focus on a core question and strategy; (b) engage students in evaluating real online content; (c) feature cognitive apprenticeship and formative assessment; and (d) support teacher learning. We examine whether these lessons helped students become more skilled evaluators of online content. Pretest/posttest data (N =574) showed statistically significant growth in students’ ability to evaluate the credibility of online content. We analyze the role played by the curriculum design principles in this interdisciplinary intervention and explore implications for future initiatives.

Background: Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and political issues. However, they struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information they encounter online. Aims: This pilot study investigated whether a focused curricular intervention could improve university students' ability to make sound judgements of credibility. Sample: Participants (n = 67) were students in four sections of a 'critical thinking and writing' course at a university on the West Coast of the United States. Course sections were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 29) and control conditions (n = 38). Methods: We conducted a pre-and-posttest, treatment/control experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 design (treatment condition × order × time) with repeated measures on the last factor. Students in the treatment group received two 75-min lessons on evaluating the credibility of online content. An assessment of online reasoning was administered to students 6 weeks prior to the intervention and again 5 weeks after. Results: Students in the treatment group were significantly more likely than students in the control group to have shown gains from pretest to posttest. Conclusions: Results suggest that teaching students a small number of flexible heuristics that can be applied across digital contexts can improve their evaluation of online sources.

Although most teachers adapt curriculum, we know little about teachers' rationales for modifying materials, how these rationales align with actual modifications, nor whether any patterns exist in the modifications that teachers make. This is especially the case in history/social studies, where research on curriculum is scant and research on teacher adaptation of curriculum is virtually non-existent. This paper addresses that gap. We report the results of a large-scale survey on curriculum use with over 1900 history teachers. The online survey focused on how and why teachers use and adapt lesson materials from a free online history curriculum and prompted teachers to upload examples of curriculum materials they had modified. We found that individual differences among teachers correlated with particular types of modifications. Moreover, we found that teachers were motivated to modify materials to address their students' needs, and that their modifications rarely affected the core structure -- or theory of content -- of the lessons. We argue that such alignment between teachers and curricular materials represents an example of "curricular fit." We discuss what curricular design features may have contributed to the high level of curricular fit among users as well as the implications of this construct for curriculum implementation efforts across subject areas.

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school students were used to examine the thinking elicited by 8 HATs and multiple-choice versions of these tasks. Results showed that although both HATs and multiple-choice items tapped historical thinking processes, HATs better reflected student proficiency in historical thinking than their multiple-choice counterparts. Item format also influenced the thinking elicited, with multiple-choice items eliciting more instances of construct-irrelevant reasoning than the constructed-response versions. Implications for history assessment are discussed.

In recent years--and especially since the 2016 presidential election--numerous media organizations, newspapers, and policy advocates have made efforts to help Americans become more careful consumers of the information they see online. In K-12 and higher education, the main approach has been to provide students with checklists they can use to assess the credibility of individual websites. However, the checklist approach is outdated. It would be far better to teach young people to follow the lead of professional fact-checkers: When confronted by a new and unfamiliar website, they begin by looking elsewhere on the web, searching for any information that might shed light on who created the site in question and for what purpose.

To be an informed citizen in today's information-rich environment, individuals must be able to evaluate information they encounter on the Internet. However, teachers currently have limited options if they want to assess students' evaluations of digital content. In response, we created a range of short tasks that assess students' "civic online reasoning"--the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information online. Assessments ranged from paper-and-pencil tasks to open Internet search tasks delivered via Google Forms. We outline a process of assessment development in which middle school, high school, and college students in 12 states completed tasks. We present a series of representative tasks and analyses of trends in student performance. Across tasks and grade levels, students struggled to effectively evaluate online claims, sources, and evidence. These results point to a need for curriculum materials that support students' development of civic online reasoning competencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced college students to spend more time online. Yet many studies show that college students struggle to discern fact from fiction on the Internet. A small body of research suggests that students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging the credibility of online sources. But what about asynchronous remote instruction? In an asynchronous college nutrition course at a large state university, we embedded modules that taught students how to vet websites using fact checkers’ strategies. Chief among these strategies was lateral reading, the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site. Students improved significantly from pretest to posttest, engaging in lateral reading more often post intervention. These findings inform efforts to scale this type of intervention in higher education.

In searching for alternatives to multiple choice tests and document-based questions, the authors were inspired by the common practice of "do-nows" (also known as "bell work") in which teachers give students a brief task at the beginning of class to prepare them for the day's lesson. Could these minutes at the start of class be used for formative assessment? With support from the Library of Congress, they set out to create tasks that would give social studies teachers new options. The exercises are built around primary sources from the Library's extensive collection. Each exercise assesses core skills of historical thinking and provides teachers with quick feedback about student understanding.

Purely leptonic decays of the charged D meson have been studied using the reaction e+e- → D*+D- at a center of mass energy of 4.03 GeV. A search was performed for D → μνμ recoiling against a D0 or D+ which had been reconstructed from its hadronic decay products. A single event candidate was found in the reaction e+e- → D*+D-, where D*+ → π+D0 with the D0 → K-π+, and the recoiling D- decaying via D- → μ-ν̄μ. This yields a branching fraction value B(D → μνμ) = 0.08+0.16+0.05-0.05-0.02%, and a corresponding value of the pseudoscalar decay constant fD = 300+180+80-150-40 MeV. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Purely leptonic decays of the charged D meson have been studied using the reaction e+e- → D*+D- at a center of mass energy of 4.03 GeV. A search was performed for D → μνμ recoiling against a D0 or D+ which had been reconstructed from its hadronic decay products. A single event candidate was found in the reaction e+e- → D*+D-, where D*+ → π+D0 with the D0 → K-π+, and the recoiling D- decaying via D- → μ-ν̄μ. This yields a branching fraction value B(D → μνμ) = 0.08+0.16+0.05-0.05-0.02%, and a corresponding value of the pseudoscalar decay constant fD = 300+180+80-150-40 MeV. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The absolute inclusive branching fraction of (Formula presented) has been measured from data collected by the BES detector at a center-of-mass energy of 4.03 GeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 22.3 pb(Formula presented). At this energy, direct pair production (Formula presented) has been observed. We have selected (Formula presented) candidate events by reconstructing five hadronic decay modes (Formula presented), (Formula presented), (Formula presented), (Formula presented) and (Formula presented) and have searched for inclusive (Formula presented)’s in the recoiling (Formula presented). We observed three recoiling (Formula presented)’s in the 166.4 (Formula presented) 31.8 (Formula presented) candidate events, which leads to the absolute branching fraction (Formula presented) and (Formula presented). © 1998 The American Physical Society.

The absolute inclusive branching fraction of (Formula presented) has been measured from data collected by the BES detector at a center-of-mass energy of 4.03 GeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 22.3 pb(Formula presented). At this energy, direct pair production (Formula presented) has been observed. We have selected (Formula presented) candidate events by reconstructing five hadronic decay modes (Formula presented), (Formula presented), (Formula presented), (Formula presented) and (Formula presented) and have searched for inclusive (Formula presented)’s in the recoiling (Formula presented). We observed three recoiling (Formula presented)’s in the 166.4 (Formula presented) 31.8 (Formula presented) candidate events, which leads to the absolute branching fraction (Formula presented) and (Formula presented). © 1998 The American Physical Society.

The absolute inclusive semileptonic branching fraction of the [Formula presented] meson has been measured based on [Formula presented] of [Formula presented] collision data collected with the Beijing Spectrometer at [Formula presented] At this energy, the [Formula presented] are produced in pairs: [Formula presented] We reconstructed [Formula presented] [Formula presented] events in five hadronic decay modes. In the recoil system of these events, several [Formula presented] inclusive semileptonic decays were observed and the branching fraction is estimated to be [Formula presented] © 1997 The American Physical Society.

The absolute inclusive semileptonic branching fraction of the [Formula presented] meson has been measured based on [Formula presented] of [Formula presented] collision data collected with the Beijing Spectrometer at [Formula presented] At this energy, the [Formula presented] are produced in pairs: [Formula presented] We reconstructed [Formula presented] [Formula presented] events in five hadronic decay modes. In the recoil system of these events, several [Formula presented] inclusive semileptonic decays were observed and the branching fraction is estimated to be [Formula presented] © 1997 The American Physical Society.

The cross section for e+e-→ρπ has been measured by the BES detector at BEPC at center-of-mass energies covering a 40 MeV interval spanning the J/ψresonance. The data are used to search for the vector gluonium state hypothesized by Brodsky, Lepage, and Tuan as an explanation of the ρπ puzzle in charmonium physics. The shape of the ρπ cross section is compatible with that of the total hadronic cross section. No distortions indicating the presence of a vector glueball are seen. © 1996 The American Physical Society.

A data-driven energy scan in the immediate vicinity of the τ pair production threshold has been performed using the Beijing Spectrometer at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider. Approximately 5pb-1 of data, distributed over 12 scan points, have been collected. A previous mass value for the τ lepton, obtained using only the eµ final state, has been published. In this paper, the final BES result on the mass measurement is presented. The analysis is based on the combined data from the ee, eµ, eh, µµ, µh, and hh final states, where h denotes a charged Π or K. A maximum likelihood fit to the τ pair production cross section data yields the value mT=1776.96-0.21 -0.17+0.18+0.25. © 1995 The American Physical Society.

A data-driven energy scan in the immediate vicinity of the τ pair production threshold has been performed using the Beijing Spectrometer at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider. Approximately 5pb-1 of data, distributed over 12 scan points, have been collected. A previous mass value for the τ lepton, obtained using only the eµ final state, has been published. In this paper, the final BES result on the mass measurement is presented. The analysis is based on the combined data from the ee, eµ, eh, µµ, µh, and hh final states, where h denotes a charged Π or K. A maximum likelihood fit to the τ pair production cross section data yields the value mT=1776.96-0.21 -0.17+0.18+0.25. © 1995 The American Physical Society.

The Beijing Spectrometer (BES) experiment has observed purely leptonic decays of the Ds meson in the reaction e+e-→Ds+Ds- at a c.m. energy of 4.03 GeV. Three events are observed in which one Ds decays hadronically to φπ, K̄*0K, or K̄0K, and the other decays leptonically to μνμ or τντ. With the assumption of μ-τ universality, values of the branching fraction, B(Ds→μνμ)=(1.5-0.6-0.2+1.3+0.3)%, and the Ds pseudoscalar decay constant, fDs=(4.3-1.3-0.4+1.5+0.4)×102 MeV, are obtained. © 1995 The American Physical Society.

This article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens of "History Assessments of Thinking" (HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity, the relationship between the constructs targeted by the assessments, and the cognitive processes students used to answer them. Three case studies trace the development of different HATs through analyses of draft assessments, student responses, and think-aloud protocols. Design principles specific to formative history assessments emerged from these analyses: (1) assessments must be historically accurate, (2) assessments must target specific historical constructs, (3) assessment structure must align with targeted constructs, (4) assessments must yield useful information for teachers, and (5) pilot data are indispensable for refining HATs. These finding suggest the need for increased attention on the construction and validation of new assessment materials for the history classroom.

Using an impact-parameter tag to select an enriched sample of Z0bb» events, we have measured the difference between the average charged multiplicity of bb» and all hadronic Z0 decays to be 2.11.8(stat) 0.6(syst) tracks per event. The resulting total (nonleading) charged multiplicity for Z0 bb» events is 23.1(12.0)1.8 0.6 tracks. A comparison of this nonleading multiplicity to hadronic multiplicity data in the range of 10 to 60 GeV supports the hypothesis of flavor-independent hadronic fragmentation, and yields a measurement of the average energy fraction of bottom hadrons in Z0 decays of xEb=0.620.100.04. © 1992 The American Physical Society.

Using an impact-parameter tag to select an enriched sample of Z0bb» events, we have measured the difference between the average charged multiplicity of bb» and all hadronic Z0 decays to be 2.11.8(stat) 0.6(syst) tracks per event. The resulting total (nonleading) charged multiplicity for Z0 bb» events is 23.1(12.0)1.8 0.6 tracks. A comparison of this nonleading multiplicity to hadronic multiplicity data in the range of 10 to 60 GeV supports the hypothesis of flavor-independent hadronic fragmentation, and yields a measurement of the average energy fraction of bottom hadrons in Z0 decays of xEb=0.620.100.04. © 1992 The American Physical Society.

We have measured the fraction of bb» events in hadronic Z0 decays, Rbb», using the vertex detector system of the Mark II detector at the SLAC Linear Collider. We tag bb» events by requiring the coincidence of three or more tracks with significant impact parameters. This tag is 50% efficient and results in a sample of 85% purity. We find Rbb»=0.251+0.049+0.030, in good agreement with other measurements and the standard model prediction. © 1991 The American Physical Society.