The News Evaluator

We want to develop an educational tool for better source criticism for schools and the society. 

Research on source criticism has shown that the best way to tell if a news article can be trusted or not is to work like professional reviewers; and that way of work will the News Evaluator teach the students. The tool will also let you test your own source critical ability and review news in your digital news flow and social media.

The News Evaluator started in 2017 as a mass experiment as a part of the science fair ForskarFredags. 5000 students helped test the tool on their own news flows, and another special (Nyhetsvärderaren Valspecial) was carried out before the Swedish election 2018. This time, the students helped investigate what political news they saw in their digital news flow and how trustworthy these were. The project is ongoing and a complete version will be launched in 2020. 

Parts of The News Evaluator is conducted through citizen science, a method where scientists and volunteers collaborate to gain new knowledge. In this project, high schools and upper secondary schools has collected and reviewed big collections of news from their own digital news flows and social media. This research wouldn’t be possible to conduct without the students.