The ability to evaluate online content has become a prerequisite for thoughtful democratic participation. The Stanford History Education Group coined the term Civic Online Reasoning — the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information online — to highlight the civic aims of our digital media literacy work.
Our Civic Online Reasoning classroom materials support students to learn to sort fact from fiction on the internet. We have developed these materials based on our research with professional fact checkers, and we have verified that the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum improves students’ online evaluation skills.
Educating for American Democracy is an unprecedented effort to build excellence in history and civics for all K-12 students. It is a call to action to invest in strengthening history and civic learning from a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators.
What follows is a document that outlines how Civic Online Reasoning classroom materials align with the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, an inquiry-based content framework for excellence in civic and history education for all learners that is organized by major themes and questions, supported by key concepts.