Sam Wineburg

American educational researcher (Samuel S. Wineburg), Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he founded and directs the Stanford History Education Group. The earlier research programme was on historical thinking — what distinguishes how academic historians read documents from how students do, and what kinds of instruction transfer those reading habits to students. The consolidating work for that programme is Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001). The programme that matters for this topic is the parallel work on civic online reasoning run through the Stanford History Education Group from roughly 2014 onwards.

Stake§

Wineburg's stake by the mid-2010s was the empirical-research one of an academic running a long programme on a problem that had become politically urgent — the inability of students, professionals, and academics to evaluate online information reliably. The 2016 report Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning, written with a Stanford History Education Group team, found that roughly 80% of US high-school and college students could not distinguish sponsored content from news articles, and the result attracted substantial press attention. The 2019 follow-up study supplied the empirical core of the case for the techniques Caulfield had been teaching in parallel.

The 2019 Teachers College Record study Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise is the work Wineburg is most-cited for in this topic. The study compared three groups — professional fact-checkers, academic historians from elite universities, and Stanford undergraduates — on their ability to evaluate unfamiliar websites making contested political claims. The fact-checkers performed substantially better than both other groups. The methodological core of the study was the think-aloud protocol: participants narrated their reasoning while working, and the resulting transcripts were coded for the strategies each group used.

The strategy that distinguished the fact-checkers was lateral reading: leaving the source under evaluation almost immediately to consult what other sources said about it, then returning. The historians and the students vertically read — staying on the site, scrolling for context, examining the site's own self-presentation, evaluating the design quality, reading the About page. The vertical strategy was substantially less accurate. The result has been cited extensively in information-literacy research and instruction; it is also the empirical case the Caulfield textbook had been working toward without yet having.

Wineburg's wider contribution to the topic is the development of think-aloud and document-analysis methods that make the cognitive processes of expert and novice readers visible in ways the literature can study. The historical-thinking programme through the 1990s and 2000s — Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001), Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) (Chicago, 2018) — used the same methodological apparatus on academic historians reading primary sources. The continuity across the two programmes is the focus on what experts do that novices do not, and on whether the expert moves are teachable through deliberate practice on worked examples.

The construct's relationship to the transfer problem is the implicit one of asking whether the techniques expert fact-checkers use can be taught to students who do not naturally use them. The Caulfield textbook is the practical answer; the empirical-effectiveness research the Stanford History Education Group has continued through the 2020s is the testing of whether the answer generalises. Early results suggest that targeted instruction does produce transfer to unfamiliar sources and topics, but the effect is sensitive to how the instruction is delivered, which is itself an ordinary finding in the transfer literature.