“The Evidence Doesn’t Speak for Itself”: Teaching Students to Think Historically about Fake News

My student’s question points to a wider problem. False information “dressed up as credible reporting” (popularly termed ‘fake news’) is increasingly difficult to recognise in the digital age (Safeguarding Network, 2025). With 97% of 13–17-year-olds having an account on at least one social media platform, social media has become the most common news source for 16–24-year-olds (Ofcom, 2025). Yet like a kid in a sweet shop, a greater exposure to content does not immediately translate to wiser choices about what to buy. Discernment in this case is clouded by confirmation bias which inclines us to favour information that aligns with our existing attitudes, and algorithms which privilege “sensational or emotionally charged content” (Kops, Schittenhelm &Wachs, 2025; Nguyen et.al, 2025, p.2). Such “false news” has even been found by “large-scale analyses” to spread six times faster than “verified information,” a concerning pattern echoed by the President of the US National Academy of Sciences, who warns that “misinformation…spreads at the speed of light throughout the globe” (Nguyen et.al, 2025, p2).

Despite some promising results shared more recently by the University of Portsmouth (2024) on students’ ability to identify “disinformation” and “unintentional misinformation”, 34% of teachers in 2017 found “that students had cited fake sources of information in their homework and assignments.” (Turner, 2017). How, then, should schools respond? The emerging consensus favours critical thinking over censorship. As Carrillo Roas (2022) warns, censorship can reinforce conspiratorial thinking: “Why would they delete it if it wasn’t true?” When teachers simply dismiss conspiratorial claims, they risk a Chinese finger-trap effect: the harder they pull against them, the tighter such claims take hold.

What history teachers already know

So, what should critical thinking look like in practice? Machete and Turpin (2020) emphasise “looking for evidence to support claims” and “evaluating the plausibility of arguments.” (p.235)

To a history teacher, this sounds remarkably familiar.

Historical thinking requires students to ask how we know what we ‘know’. As Christine Counsell (2002) argues, separating “historical knowledge and historical skills” creates “a distracting dichotomy” (pp. 71, 83); the two are inseparable in meaningful historical thinking. Historical interpretations are particularly well suited to developing students’ ability to evaluate different, evidence-based claims. Faced with competing accounts, students must consider not simply which is ‘true’, but how and why different claims about the past have been constructed. This applies as much to visual representations as written accounts. As Jane Card (2004) puts it, rather than simply asking whether an image is accurate, students should ask: “Why is this image the way it is?” (p.6)

Chapman (2017) describes one common approach to interpretations as “naive realism”: assuming “that the past has a fixed identity and meaning” and searching for the “best account” that most closely “copies the past” (p.102; Lee &Shemilt, 2004, p. 30). Faced with contradictory claims online, students might similarly search for an unbiased account containing ‘the facts’.

The opposite trap is what Cassedy and colleagues (2011) call “simple subjectivism”: because “all interpretations are constructed”, we assume they have “equal explanatory power” (p.15). Yet “consider everything” is not, by itself, critical thinking. If every account is simply another perspective, on what grounds can students distinguish a well-supported claim from a conspiracy theory?

E. P. Thompson (1993) offers a way between these positions: “The facts do not speak for themselves”, but neither is evidence “silent and inert”; theory and evidence must remain “in dialogue” (pp.274-275). Megill (2007) similarly describes historical objectivity as maintaining “a critical frame of mind” without becoming “paralyzed by the uncertainties of historical knowledge.” (p.167) The challenge, then, is to help students understand why historians can construct different accounts of the same past, without concluding that every account is equally convincing.

Trying it with Year 7

The demands of such a task became evident to me while teaching a Year 7 class.

When I asked what historical interpretations were, over three quarters of students selected “the true version of an event”. When asked whether two interpretations of the same event could both be valid, around a third thought one must always be wrong. More revealingly, almost a half thought both could be valid, but only if they used the same sources. My students, it seemed, had adopted a largely naïve realist view of history, expecting history to provide a single correct story, or at very least draw on identical evidence: difference between accounts was something to be resolved rather than explained.

I therefore adapted an existing enquiry on the Peasants’ Revolt, shifting its disciplinary focus from significance to interpretations: “Why are there different stories about the Peasants’ Revolt?” I first built the substantive knowledge they would need to interrogate an interpretation about the Peasants’ Revolt. Students explored the causes, events and consequences of the revolt before debating whether it could be understood as a story of violence or reform. I then explicitly introduced historical interpretations as evidence-based explanations shaped by choices about what to include and emphasise.

Over the following lessons, students encountered two contrasting interpretations. An eighteenth-century engraving by Anker Smith presented the confrontation between Wat Tyler and Richard II as violent and disorderly. Rather than simply asking whether Smith's image was accurate, students identified what he chose to emphasise (the weapons, anger and chaos), but also what his representation omitted (a negotiation for fairer laws and equality amongst men). They then compared Smith's representation with evidence from Froissart's Chronicles, considering how evidence from a source might have contributed to the construction of the later interpretation.

Students subsequently encountered Alastair Dunn's interpretation of the revolt as a more organised call for reform. Here, the same disciplinary questions applied to a very different form of interpretation. What had Dunn chosen to emphasise? What evidence might have supported those choices? Rather than asking which account “told the truth”, students began to examine how two different stories about the same past could be constructed from choices about evidence and emphasis.

There were signs of genuine, if uneven, progression. By the fourth lesson, students were independently explaining that historians make different choices about evidence and emphasis. In their final essays, all students could summarise interpretations and identify emphasis, almost a half of students supported arguments using their own historical knowledge, while around a third could explain why interpretations differed.

Asking better questions

History cannot solve the problem of fake news. But it gives students an opportunity to practise existing in a liminal space where they can evaluate competing claims without concluding that truth is arbitrary. The challenge is to equip them to ask better questions: What claim is being made? What evidence supports it? What has been selected or omitted? Could the same evidence support a different argument? What would make one interpretation more convincing than another?

In a “post-truth era” (University of Portsmouth, 2024), “Miss, how do I know?” might just be one of the most important questions a student can learn to ask.

Author: Sylvie Abdoo is a History teacher in North-West London and a First-Class graduate of the University of Edinburgh.

Reference List:

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