El alumnado de educación secundaria frente a las noticias falsas: resultados de una intervención didáctica

Social networks have become one of the main sources of information, especially among young people. At the same time, the production and circulation of fake news through the networks has increased. In this context, it is crucial that young people acquire strategies and skills to read critically the information they consume. This work seeks to know the effects of a didactic intervention carried out during the confinement decreed by COVID-19, the objective of which was for students to develop skills to detect fake news. It is a participatory research with a pre-test and post-test design. The results show that students increased their competence to identify some types of falsehoods such as unproven data and misrepresented information, although they had problems recognizing decontextualized information or the use of discriminatory language. The strategies he used the most are checking data on the internet and the use of verifiers. Differentiated behaviors were observed between the students who identified the false information and those who did not. The conclusions point to the need to work in the classroom in a comprehensive, extensive and transversal way evaluating the information based on the skills that the students already possess.