Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
Breakstone J, Smith M, Wineburg S, Rapaport A, Carle J, Garland M, Saavedra A · 2021
grade Dreviewdeveloper-lednot-applicable
Sample
3,446 high school students in 14 states, sampled to match the demographic profile of US high schoolers
Population
US high school students, 2018-2019
Design
A descriptive national assessment of how well US high school students evaluate online information. No intervention, no comparison condition, no causal question. It establishes the size of the problem that the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum was designed to address, which is why it is recorded rather than ignored.
Key findings
Students performed very poorly on basic evaluations of digital sources - large majorities failed tasks such as identifying the funder behind an advocacy website or recognising a video as unrelated to its claimed subject. On one task only three of more than 3,000 students traced the source of a video. The finding is about prevalence, not about what instruction can do.
Genetic confound
Not applicable - descriptive prevalence, no causal claim.
Replication notes
not-applicable - a survey of the state of the world, not a testable causal claim.
DOI / URL
10.3102/0013189X211017495
Effects
| Outcome | Metric | Value | Measure | Timing | Vs | Horizon | Class |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline competence at evaluating digital sources | percentage of students passing researcher-built tasks | overwhelming majorities failed; near-floor performance on source-tracing tasks | researcher-designed | single cross-sectional administration | none | not-applicable | domain-skill |