Sara Flores-Amper's ID Portfolio

Navigation links: ETAP 623 Fall 2026 | Link to my mini-course front page

About Me

My name is Sara Flores-Amper. I have a background in nutrition, food systems, and food science and currently work in community nutrition education, where I develop and teach programs for a variety of audiences. Through my work and graduate studies, I have become increasingly interested in how people make sense of information, how instructional design can support deeper learning, and how learners can become more thoughtful and independent in the way they evaluate what they encounter. Outside of work and school, I enjoy cooking, yoga, and spending time outdoors.

My Topic and Purpose

My mini-course will focus on teaching digital information evaluation, particularly how educators can help students develop strategies for deciding whether information they encounter online is credible, well-supported, and worthy of trust. I chose this topic because people are exposed to a large amount of information through social media, websites, videos, and other digital platforms, often with very little time or context for evaluating it. Information can include a mix of facts, opinions, persuasive messaging, incomplete evidence, and misleading claims, which can make credibility difficult to judge at first glance.

I am interested in this topic because media literacy has become relevant across subject areas and in everyday life. Teachers are in a position to help students develop these skills, but the rapidly changing digital environment also presents challenges for instruction. Rather than focusing on teaching students to identify obviously false information or memorize a checklist of warning signs, I want the course to help educators develop and teach flexible strategies for investigating claims, evaluating evidence, and making informed judgments about digital information.

Scope of Learning Outcomes and Content

The mini-course will address conceptual knowledge, procedural skills, and attitudes related to evaluating digital information and teaching these skills to high school students.

Conceptually, learners will develop a more nuanced understanding of credibility and the challenges of evaluating information in digital environments. They will explore factors such as who created a piece of information, what evidence is being used, where that evidence originated, what purpose the information may serve, and whether important context is missing. Learners will also consider how features of digital media, such as algorithms, repeated exposure, persuasive language, and engagement-driven content, can influence how information is presented and interpreted. They will examine why familiar credibility cues may be insufficient and how these challenges affect what students need to learn.

The course will also develop procedural and instructional skills. Educators will practice looking beyond the original post or webpage, tracing claims to their original sources, comparing information across multiple sources, examining the evidence behind a claim, and searching for additional context. The goal will be for educators to develop an approach to teaching information evaluation that helps students understand the reasoning behind verification strategies rather than relying on a simple list of signs that something is either "reliable" or "unreliable."

An attitudinal component will also be important because educators need to be willing to question information even when it agrees with something they already believe or comes from a source they are inclined to trust. The course will encourage learners to reflect on their own evaluation habits, approach unfamiliar information with curiosity, recognize when more evidence is needed, and become more comfortable with uncertainty. It will also emphasize the importance of creating learning environments where students feel comfortable questioning information, explaining their reasoning, and revising initial judgments when stronger evidence becomes available.

Needs Assessment

Educational Problem/Opportunity

Adolescents encounter much of their information through digital spaces including websites, search engines, social media, video platforms, and increasingly, generative artificial intelligence (AI). Because high school students use these technologies so often, it is tempting to assume that frequent use translates into a strong ability to evaluate the information they produce. Research suggests a more complicated picture. Adolescents use a range of strategies to judge credibility (Besharat-Mann, 2024; Kiili et al., 2022), but the digital environment is changing quickly enough that a fixed set of rules or warning signs may not transfer well from one platform, technology, or type of information to another.

Generative AI sharpens this problem. Chu-Ke and Dong (2024) argue that both misinformation and the literacies needed to respond to it must be reconsidered because generative AI is increasingly accessible and can produce realistic, persuasive synthetic text, video, and audio. False information can now be made to look credible quickly and with little technical expertise.

These challenges have implications for teachers across subject areas. Educators may be familiar with traditional strategies for evaluating sources, but those strategies are not necessarily sufficient for evaluating information across today's digital platforms. Teaching students to recognize familiar warning signs may not prepare them to investigate information when those signs are absent or misleading. Teachers therefore need opportunities to examine their own evaluation practices, learn adaptable verification strategies, and consider how to teach those strategies in ways that support students' independent reasoning.

The opportunity, then, is not to provide educators with an updated checklist of suspicious features, since any checklist tied to current technology will eventually become outdated. Instead, professional learning can help teachers develop and model evaluation processes that transfer to unfamiliar sources and emerging technologies, and design instruction that helps students practice those processes themselves.

Learners/Participants

The intended learners for this mini course are secondary educators, particularly those teaching high school students grades 9-12. This course is intended to be relevant across subject areas because evaluating digital information is not limited to a single discipline. Teachers may encounter these challenges when students conduct research, use AI-generated information, engage with current events, or evaluate claims related to course content.

Educators bring existing knowledge and experience with evaluating sources and helping students use information responsibly. However, their familiarity with emerging technologies, digital platforms, misinformation, and specific evaluation strategies such as lateral reading may vary. Some have received formal training in media literacy, while others may rely primarily on strategies learned through their own education or teaching experience.

These learners should not be treated as lacking critical thinking skills or digital competence. Rather, the course will build on their existing instructional knowledge while creating opportunities to reconsider familiar evaluation strategies and explore how those strategies can be adapted to a changing information environment.

Analysis of the Gap: Current Reality and Ideal

Adolescents already rely on rules of thumb when evaluating online information. In Besharat-Mann’s (2024) study, high school seniors described checking a website’s domain, looking for cited sources, and attending to recognizable page features. These strategies appeared to reflect prior media-literacy instruction, but students could not always explain the reasoning behind them, and many were satisfied simply seeing a reference list without checking it.

Heuristics are not inherently a problem. Chu-Ke and Dong (2024) describe them as economical and sometimes beneficial, while noting that they can introduce cognitive biases. The concern is not that students use shortcuts, but that a shortcut is only useful when a learner understands its limits. A “.gov” domain indicates who operates a website, but cannot establish the quality of every claim on it. Citations are encouraging, but students still need to check whether those sources support the claim. A polished page may once have signaled credibility, but AI tools can now generate convincing websites, images, voices, and text with little effort. Research on advertising literacy shows a similar pattern: clearer sponsorship disclosures helped high school students recognize advertising but it did not change their critical attitudes toward it (Lin et al., 2026). Recognizing a cue is not the same as reasoning critically about it.

These findings also raise questions about the strategies educators teach and model. If students are taught to evaluate credibility primarily through familiar features such as domains, citations, or website appearance, they may learn to recognize those features without developing the reasoning needed to determine whether information is trustworthy.

For these reasons, Chu-Ke and Dong (2024) argue that AI literacy should include critically evaluating the social and cultural contexts in which AI operates and strategically interpreting and verifying AI-generated content through source verification, fact-checking resources, and hands-on experience with AI tools.

Ideally, educators would be able to model a more flexible approach to evaluating information by asking:

Who or what produced this information?
What evidence supports this claim?
Can the original source be located?
What do independent sources say?
What might the creator be trying to accomplish?
Which aspects of this information can be verified?
What additional information is needed before reaching a confident conclusion?

Lateral reading offers one model of such a transferable process. Lateral readers leave a webpage and investigate the source through other sources. Professional fact-checkers using this approach reached accurate conclusions more efficiently than people who relied on a site’s appearance, URL, or content (McGrew, 2024).

For educators, the gap involves not only developing flexible learning strategies for evaluating unfamiliar information themselves, but also learning how to model the processes so students can apply them independently.

Secondary educators bring existing knowledge and experience in teaching source evaluation, but a rapidly changing information environment can limit the usefulness of familiar credibility rules. Educators need opportunities to strengthen their own verification and reasoning processes and develop instructional strategies that help students apply these skills when sources, technologies, persuasive techniques, and forms of misinformation change.

Existing Efforts to Address the Gap

Recent approaches to media literacy often increasingly emphasize transferable processes over static credibility checklists. McGrew’s (2024) review found positive effects of lateral-reading instruction from elementary school through adulthood. In one high school field study, students of six 12th grade teachers who taught six 50-minute lessons on evaluating online information improved significantly more than students in comparison classrooms. In a Canadian program, only 6% identified an advocacy group’s agenda before instruction; this rose to 31% immediately afterward and 49% six weeks later (Brodsky et al., 2023, as cited in Abrams, 2024). Broader critical media literacy programs also show promise.A program for Colombian high school students improved their overall media competence, though not every dimension improved (Mesquita-Romero et al., 2022).

These findings suggest that explicit instruction can improve students' information-evaluation skills, but effective implementation also depends on teachers' understanding of the strategies they are expected to teach.

The research also suggests that instruction itself needs to keep evolving. McGrew (2024) reports that even after six hours of professional development, teachers continued to endorse judging online content by its URL or appearance and did not consistently challenge students who used those strategies. Teachers may have learned evaluation practices suited to an earlier version of the internet and may need support adapting them. Students have noticed this too: seniors in Bersharat-Mann’s (2024) study trusted their teachers but felt many were not current with how information is consumed online. In an APA Monitor feature, researcher Sam Wineburg noted that many teachers do not feel equipped to teach these skills without further professional development. Education researcher Chelsea Waite argued that because students are ahead of educators with new technologies, they should be involved in designing media literacy curriculum (Abrams, 2024). Being ahead with new technologies, however, does not necessarily mean students have stronger evaluation frameworks.

Together, these findings suggest a need for professional learning that connects educators' own information-evaluation skills with their instructional practices. A mini-course could give teachers opportunities to investigate digital claims, practice verification strategies, and consider how to help students develop these same skills.

Intent Statement

This mini course will help secondary educators develop flexible, transferable strategies for evaluating digital information in a rapidly changing media environment and applying these strategies in their teaching. It builds on the credibility strategies educators already use and helps them understand the reasoning behind those strategies. Learners will practice investigating who or what produced information, tracing claims to original sources, comparing independent sources, evaluating evidence and persuasive intent, and recognizing when familiar credibility cues are insufficient. They will also consider how to model these processes and design learning activities that help their students develop their own evaluation skills. The broader goal is to support instruction that helps students evaluate information independently, even as the technology, platform, or form of misinformation changes.

Analysis of the Learner and Context

The intended learners for this mini-course are secondary educators, particularly those working with high school students in grades 9-12. They are likely to have substantial experience teaching students to evaluate sources, conduct research, and use digital information, but their prior training and experience with media literacy and source evaluation may vary. Educators may already use familiar credibility strategies, but they may not always recognize when those cues are insufficient or how to help students move beyond them

An important characteristic of these learners is that they bring existing instructional knowledge and experience to teaching media literacy in a rapidly changing digital environment. Generative AI can now produce realistic and persuasive text, images, video, and audio, making some traditional surface-level credibility cues less reliable. For this reason, the mini-course should build on educator’ existing knowledge while emphasizing flexible strategies such as source verification, corroboration, and lateral reading rather than memorizing a fixed checklist. It should also provide opportunities for educators to consider how these strategies can be modeled and taught to their own students.

The mini-course will be delivered online and will require an internet-connected computer or tablet and a web browser. Activities will use realistic digital examples and give learners opportunities to compare sources, investigate credibility, and explain their reasoning. Educators will also apply what they learn by considering how to incorporate these strategies into instructional activities. Because participants may differ in prior knowledge, technical familiarity, and teaching experience, instructions and examples should be clear and scaffolded. The course will be designed as a short, self-paced experience that allows educators to work through the material and develop instructional applications relevant to their teaching contexts.

Performance-Based Objectives

After completing this mini-course, learners will be able to:

Analyze digital information and identify factors that influence credibility, including source reliability, supporting evidence, persuasive intent, and limitations of familiar credibility cues.
Apply verification strategies, including lateral reading, source tracing, and corroboration, to investigate unfamiliar digital claims and evaluate the strength of the available evidence.
Evaluate and justify conclusions about the credibility of digital information using evidence from multiple sources, recognizing when additional information is needed or a conclusion remains uncertain.
Design a learning activity for high school students that incorporates digital information evaluation strategies, appropriate instructional scaffolding, and methods for assessing students' reasoning and verification skills.

Task and Content Analysis

Prerequisites

Before beginning this mini-course, the learner:

Should have basic knowledge of online research, search engines, and navigating digital information.
Should be familiar with common research practices, including evaluating sources, locating supporting evidence, and citing information.
Should have experience planning classroom instruction and supporting students in research-based learning activities.

Unit 1: Evaluating Online Sources

After completing this unit, the learner:

Will be able to identify common indicators used to judge the credibility of online information, including author credentials, website design, domain names, and citations.
Will be able to explain why familiar indicators of credibility may be insufficient when evaluating online information.
Will recognize how misinformation, AI-generated content, and persuasive online communication can influence perceptions of credibility.
Will be able to identify common misconceptions students may have about what makes an online source trustworthy.
Will examine unfamiliar websites or articles and reflect on the factors that influence theri initial credibility judgments.

Unit 2: Rethinking Research and Source Evaluation

After this unit, the learner:

Will be able to identify limitations of familiar research and source-evaluation practices in today’s digital information environment.
Will be able to apply lateral reading and source tracing to investigate the credibility of unfamiliar websites, articles, and online claims.
Will be able to evaluate whether citations and supporting evidence substantiate the claims being made.
Will compare initial credibility judgments with findings from independent verification and explain how additional evidence influences their conclusions.
Will complete a guided investigation of an online source using familiar evaluation practices and additional verification strategies
Will begin identifying opportunities to incorporate these strategies into existing classroom research activities.

Unit 3: Teaching Critical Evaluation Through Research

After this unit, the learner:

Will be able to model investigative source-evaluation strategies for students, including lateral reading and verification of supporting evidence.
Will be able to identify opportunities to strengthen existing classroom research activity that requires students to investigate and justify the credibility of their sources.
Will be able to develop assessment criteria that evaluate students’s reasoning and use of evidence when making credibility judgments.
Will review an existing classroom research activity or assignment and identify opportunities for improvement.
Will complete a classroom-ready research activity incorporating source-evaluation strategies explores throughout the mini-course.

Curriculum Map

References and Resources

Abrams, Z. (2024, September). How to teach students critical thinking skills to combat misinformation online. Monitor on Psychology, 55(6). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/09/media-literacy-misinformation Besharat-Mann, R. (2024). Can I trust this information? Using adolescent narratives to uncover online information seeking processes. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 16(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2024-16-1-1

Chu-Ke, C., & Dong, Y. (2024). Misinformation and literacies in the era of generative artificial intelligence: A brief overview and a call for future research. Emerging Media, 2(1), 70–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543241240285

Kiili, C., Bråten, I., Strømsø, H. I., Hagerman, M. S., Räikkönen, E., & Jyrkiäinen, A. (2022). Adolescents' credibility justifications when evaluating online texts. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 7421–7450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-10907-x

Lin, Y.-E. C., Chang, F.-C., Huang, T.-F., Chiang, S. C., Chiu, C.-H., Chen, P.-H., Miao, N.-F., & Chuang, H.-Y. (2026). Effects of social media sponsorship disclosure on adolescents' advertising literacy and purchase intention. PLOS ONE, 21(5), e0348505. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348505

McGrew, S. (2024). Teaching lateral reading: Interventions to help people read like fact checkers. Current Opinion in Psychology, 55, 101737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101737

Mesquita-Romero, W.-A., Fernández-Morante, M.-C., & Cebreiro-López, B. (2022). Critical media literacy to improve students' competencies. Comunicar, 70, 41–51. https://doi.org/10.3916/C70-2022-04