Civic Online Reasoning Across the Curriculum: Developing and Testing the Efficacy of Digital Literacy Lessons

574 ninth-grade students who completed both pre- and post-test; 8 teachers (6 biology, plus geography) in one high school

Ninth graders in general and honors biology and general world geography classes at a single US high school

A single-group pre-test/post-test study across one school year with NO CONTROL GROUP. The authors state this themselves as a limitation and call for a randomised trial. Lessons embedding source-evaluation strategies were taught in biology and geography classes; outcomes were the team's own constructed-response Civic Online Reasoning items, scored by a member of the research team with 20% double-coded. Developed and evaluated by the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum's own authors.

Statistically significant growth in students' ability to evaluate the credibility of online content from pre-test to post-test. With no control arm, an entire school year of maturation, repeated testing on parallel forms, and everything else ninth graders did that year are all inside the estimate, so the design cannot separate the lessons from the calendar.

Not estimable - a single-group design has no contrast in which confounding could be assessed.

not-applicable - a design with no counterfactual cannot corroborate or fail to corroborate a causal claim.