Brandon, a 15-year-old student, was certain about the veracity of an article he read online. "I read it. It's true. End of story."
"Are you saying anything you read is true?" we asked him.
He replied, "No. Of course not. Your friends make up stuff and say it just to be funny. Or sometimes to be mean. But this is different. It's news. It was online. It's true.""So, if you read it online, it's true? Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes. No. It's like, if it is news, then one place to get news is online, and news is nonfiction. Nonfiction is true."
A Confusion of Terms
In 2014, we surveyed 788 teachers from grades 1–12 and asked them how they define the term nonfiction for their students. The most common answers included "an informational text," "facts," "true," "real," and "not fake." Then we surveyed 1,300 students from grades 1–12 and asked them to define nonfiction. The most common responses from students included "information books," "true stories," "things that are real," and "not fake."
We understand the temptation to tell students that non means "not" and fiction means "imaginary," so not imaginary must mean "real" or "true." And yet this is not accurate. The term nonfiction was invented as libraries categorized books into two sections, one for novels (called fiction) and one for everything else (this became nonfiction). So nonfiction comprises a lot of imaginary musings: mythology, comic books, joke books, short stories, poetry, drama, philosophy, editorials, political cartoons, and satire. Even children's letters to Santa Claus are nonfiction, though they may not make it into any library collection. By this classification, nonfiction literally meant a work that wasn't a novel—a work of fiction. Now, however, we've lost that nuanced understanding, and too often we tell students that the term nonfiction means "not false," or, in other words, "true."
It is this lack of nuanced understanding that led to Brandon's confusion. He looked at a text that had been labeled nonfiction, remembered that his teacher had told him that nonfiction is true, and concluded the text must also be true. Brandon had not been taught that nonfiction is a body of work that offers a purported truth, and the reader's job is to think critically about whether it is indeed accurate. Fiction invites us into an imaginary world. Nonfiction, on the other hand, enters our world and requires us to do more than blindly accept it, as we explain in Reading Nonfiction: Stances, Signposts, and Strategies (Beers & Probst, 2015).
A simplistic definition of nonfiction—"true"—lures students into complacency at first and then confusion later when they discover that much of nonfiction is biased or filled with half-truths or complete fabrications. We must teach students to read nonfiction with both an open mind and a skeptical eye; we must help them learn that critical literacy involves doing more than accepting information and more than learning from the text. Critical literacy requires the ability and willingness to examine the author's assertions, weigh evidence, and look closely at logic. Readers who are critically literate are willing to change their own minds or challenge the text and the author, depending on what the text warrants.
Fake News
Perhaps this willingness to reconsider our understanding of nonfiction is now more important than ever because of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, which constantly bombard us with news. We must learn to be both responsive and responsible readers. In Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters, we wrote that "to hold on to ideas when evidence and reason suggest that a change is sensible is to fail to be responsible to oneself" (Beers & Probst, 2017). This notion of responsibility—to oneself, the text, and others—moves to the foreground in our click-and-share world.
A 2016 report released by the Stanford History Education Group found that students have trouble evaluating the credibility of online information. The lead author, Sam Wineburg, explained, "Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true" (Donald, 2016). We weren't surprised at the findings, in light of our student survey. When students are taught that nonfiction means "true," they accept more than question and share more than verify.
Fake news stories are those that are created as clickbait, fabricated to entice readers and increase ad revenue based on the number of views (clicks). Unlike satire, which relies on the reader's ability to read critically, fake news relies on the reader's gullibility. Although we can't know with certainty the writer's motivations for generating fake news, we can assert that the reader has a responsibility to consume all news with a keener, more skeptical eye. To help our youngest readers spot fake news, we remind them to ask themselves three questions about any news story, especially those found online:
- How does it look?
- What does it say?
- How does it make me feel?
Figure
Source: From Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters, by K. Beers and R. E. Probst, 2017, New York: Scholastic. Copyright 2017 by K. Beers and R. E. Probst. Reprinted with permission.
Headlines that are filled with extreme language, photos without attribution, and URLs that don't follow typical patterns are all signs that an article is suspect. News stories that don't have an author, present information that doesn't seem credible, or offer information that makes the reader feel too angry or too smug are also worth considering closely.
We must teach students to read responsively and responsibly. Until we do, we run the risk of being a nation of readers who harm both themselves and others as they share not only misinformation but also blatant lies.