Instruction Increases Canadian Students’ Preference for and Use of Lateral Reading Strategies to Fact-Check Online Information
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian middle and high school students (N = 2,278) completed a “CTRL-F” curriculum teaching them how to evaluate online information by reading laterally to investigate sources, check claims, and trace information to original contexts. A subset of CTRL-F students (N = 316) were in classes with teacher-matched control groups (N = 287). Some CTRL-F students (N = 994) completed a delayed posttest. At pretest, students indicated preference for some lateral reading strategies, but preference rarely translated into use. Following instruction, CTRL-F students showed greater preference for and use of lateral reading than controls and greater alignment between preference and use. The curriculum’s impact varied by demographic factors but not by differences in implementation. Gains were maintained from posttest to delayed posttest. Direct instruction and practice in lateral reading appear to strengthen connections between students’ preferences and utilization of these strategies to evaluate online content relevant to academic and personal life.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it