Improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Table 3 Keywords used to automatically score responses for lateral reading

Type	Keywords	Sample response
Consulting external sources	wiki, googl, snope, politifact, cnn, breitbart, huffington, national geographic	“I looked up "Big League Politics" on wikipedia, but there was not a lot of information on it. I did find that it was founded by employees of Breitbart News, which was a conservative website that was described as racist and misogynistic. I also looked up the title of the article which led to a snopes page which said it was false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-childs-skull-found-alleged-sex-trafficking-bunker/”
Searching	revers*, search, searched, researched, researching, looked up, look up, looked for, look into, looking up, looked it up	“In order to decide whether to trust the photo or not, I reversed the image. I was able to fact check it on a website. The website mentioned that the flowers were not mutated due to radiation.”
Referencing the four moves	investigat*, original, other websites, other sites, four moves, four factors, fact check, hoax, debunk	“By investigating the source, I went to the article and took a few keywords and looked it up. I was able to fact check through the google search engine. I found other sources that spoke on the situation of the school shooting where the teachers and students were armed with rocks. There were other sources, such as the National Post and the abc.net.”