Think Deeper: Teaching Kids to Develop Critical Thinking About News and Media
Last month, my thirteen-year-old daughter came to the dinner table with a news article she’d found on social media. “This says that eating chocolate for breakfast helps you lose weight,” she said, setting her phone down. “But I looked at the study they’re citing, and it was done on twelve mice over two weeks, and the headline is way more exciting than what the research actually found.” Her younger brother looked at her like she’d just performed a magic trick. I looked at her with the quiet pride of a parent who had spent three years practicing media analysis at the dinner table, watching her transform from a passive consumer of everything she read online into an active, skeptical, thoughtful evaluator of information. ...