Teaching Today’s Kids To Spot Tomorrow’s Fake News

Children and adults alike are faced with misleading information and unsupported claims, which often lead to bad decision making. How do we teach children to distinguish good information from bad? The answer is clear: Research shows that if we start early, giving children the intellectual tools to assess the credibility of information is neither as hard nor as amorphous as it might seem. Susan Engel will share research on how young children decide whom to trust, how they learn to separate fact from fiction, and how we can support their growing ability to seek the truth.

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Susan Engel is a developmental psychologist and the Class of 1959 Director of the Program in Teaching at Williams College, where she has been for 33 years. She was a co-founder and educational advisor to an experimental school in New York State called the Hayground School, where she guided curriculum development and supervised teachers for 20 years. Engel is the author of The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Harvard University Press 2015), a book for teachers titled The Children You Teach (Heinemann 2018), and The Intellectual Lives of Children (Harvard University Press 2021) and has published articles on narrative development, curriculum, and the development of children’s ideas.