Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University and the founder of the Stanford History Education Group, the lab (later renamed the Digital Inquiry Group) behind the widely used "Reading Like a Historian" curriculum. His earlier career was built on the cognitive study of historical thinking — how experts and novices reason about evidence — and his book Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) (2018) marks his turn toward how that reasoning fails online. Sarah McGrew was, when this study was written, his doctoral candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, studying how young people evaluate online information; she has since become an associate professor at the University of Maryland's College of Education and a leading researcher on civic online reasoning. The paper is the work that put the term "lateral reading" into circulation.

The article appeared in Teachers College Record (vol. 121, no. 11) in 2019, a peer-reviewed education journal published from Teachers College, Columbia University; the manuscript carries an internal date of July 2018, and a working-paper version had circulated since 2017, so the writing slightly precedes formal publication. Peer review sits between the authors and the page. The study reports primary data the authors collected themselves — a controlled expert/novice comparison — and it is the only peer-reviewed primary research report among the grading-and-literacy sources in this set.

It is a primary research report. Wineburg and McGrew sampled 45 experienced internet users — 10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact-checkers, and 25 Stanford undergraduates — and had them think aloud while evaluating live websites on contested topics such as bullying, the minimum wage, and teacher tenure. The finding is that fact-checkers "read laterally," leaving a page after a quick scan to check it against other sources, while historians and students "read vertically," staying on the page and being misled by official-looking logos and domains; the fact-checkers reached more warranted judgments in a fraction of the time. The think-aloud protocols and tasks are described in enough detail to be traced and replicated. The study's relation to the rest of this set is direct: it appeared two years after Mike Caulfield's open textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, whose "four moves" formalise the lateral-reading behaviour into a teachable routine — and Caulfield and Wineburg went on to co-author the trade book Verified (2023). Within skill-formation more broadly, it is an expert/novice study in the tradition that runs through this corpus, a paper about what an expensively trained reasoning expert — the historian — does worse than a fact-checker at a specific task.

The authors' stake is academic and reputational rather than commercial. The Stanford History Education Group is a non-profit research and curriculum operation, and the finding here underwrites the digital-literacy lessons the group distributes free; the gain is the standing of a research programme and the uptake of its curriculum, not a product sale. The framing — fact-checkers as the experts to emulate — is the study's argument as well as its result, and the curriculum the group sells around it is built on that argument.