Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

Mike Caulfield is a digital-literacy practitioner and researcher who, when this book was written, directed blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver. He had spent years building open educational materials and running a fact-checking-skills project in partnership with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. He has since moved to the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public as a research scientist, where he leads a rapid-response team studying how misinformation spreads during elections and crises, and in 2023 he co-authored the trade book Verified with Sam Wineburg. His work has consistently been aimed at teachers and students — practical routines for evaluating sources — rather than at an academic-journal audience.

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers is a free, open textbook, published in 2017 on the Pressbooks platform and carried in the Open Textbook Library. There is no peer-review or publisher's filter between Caulfield and the page; it is self-published open courseware, written and revised by its author, with the trade-off and the transparency that implies. It is dated to the year of writing and was composed as a teaching text — built to be assigned, adapted, and reused under an open licence — rather than as a report of new findings.

The book is a secondary, instructional work: it converts research into a method. Its core is the "four moves" — check for previous work, go upstream to the source, read laterally, and circle back — a set of habits a student can run when assessing an unfamiliar claim or site. "Read laterally" is the move that ties this book to the rest of the set. Leaving a page after a quick scan to check a site against other sources is the behaviour Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew observed in professional fact-checkers, and not in historians or Stanford undergraduates, in a study published two years after this book. The textbook and the study are the pedagogical and the empirical halves of the same idea, written in the same period by authors who went on to collaborate. The widely circulated "SIFT" acronym — Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to the original context — is Caulfield's 2019 renaming and tightening of the same four-move approach; this 2017 book predates the acronym, so a reader expecting "SIFT" will find its substance here under the earlier name. The book cites the underlying research lightly, in the manner of a textbook, and points readers toward primary studies rather than reproducing them.

Caulfield's stake is professional and mission-driven rather than financial. The book is given away, not sold, and it advances a programme — teaching verification skills at scale — that has defined his career and his subsequent posts. The gain is the adoption of his method and the standing that comes with it; the four moves are an argument for one way of teaching web evaluation, made by someone whose work depends on that way being taken up.