Sarah McGrew
Associate Professor, College of Education
University of Maryland
Area of Expertise: Critical Information Literacy
Sarah McGrew is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. She studies how education can respond to the spread of online misinformation and disinformation, focusing on how young people search for and evaluate information on contentious topics and how schools can better support effective evaluation skills.
-
Sarah McGrew & Elizabeth C. Reynolds (2026). Discussing Credibility and Corroboration: Differences in Students’ Reasoning About Digital Sources and Claims. American Educational Research Journal, 63(3), 611-649.
As concerns about digital misinformation proliferate, scholars have evaluated a range of interventions to support people to detect misinformation and identify credible sources. One approach involves teaching lateral reading—opening new browser tabs to search for more information about the credibility of a source or the accuracy of its claims via additional credible sources. We investigated students’ reasoning as they discussed how they researched the credibility of sources or corroborated the accuracy of claims during an intervention in which both these processes were introduced as lateral reading. Our results suggest that judging source credibility and verifying the accuracy of claims involve different reasoning processes that deserve to be taught separately to prepare students to find credible information online.
-
Sarah McGrew (2025). Talking about Credibility, Students, and Facilitation: Opportunities to Learn About Teaching Online Evaluations in Rehearsal Debriefs. Teaching and Teacher Education, 153.
Teachers need opportunities to learn to teach online evaluations as pressure grows on schools to teach these skills. Debriefs after teachers rehearse facilitating discussions about online source credibility provide a promising context for such learning. We consider opportunities for teacher learning present in these debriefs with thirteen teachers participating in a professional development program. Analyses of six rehearsal transcripts revealed that teachers focused on three topics: how they reasoned about source credibility, how to support students’ reasoning about credibility, and general discussion facilitation strategies. Rehearsal debriefs may create opportunities to learn about critical elements of teaching students to evaluate digital content.
-
Sarah McGrew (2024). Teaching Lateral Reading: Interventions to Help People Read Like Fact Checkers. Current Opinion in Psychology, Vol. 55
People need more support learning to evaluate the credibility of online information. This article reviews recent research on interventions designed to teach lateral reading, the strategy of leaving an unfamiliar website to search for information about a source's credibility via additional sources. Interventions that use diverse designs to teach lateral reading and target participants in elementary school through adulthood have shown evidence of improving participants' digital evaluations. These interventions suggest that targeted and explicit instruction in lateral reading can help people both assess credible information and identify misinformation. Still, much more work is needed in a wider range of contexts to probe the design elements, duration, and teacher education needed to support successful interventions.
