Sam Wineburg

About

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University. In 2002, Wineburg founded the Stanford History Education Group, whose curriculum and assessments have been downloaded over 16 million times, making it one of the largest providers of free curriculum in the world. His research since 2016 has focused on how people judge the credibility of digital content, a topic that has been widely reported in major media outlets and translated into dozens of languages. His articles and commentaries have appeared in various publications, including Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. He authored the book 'Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past,' which won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. In 2013, he was named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months lecturing across India. His work on digital literacy was honored by UNESCO's 'Global Media and Information' award in 2020. His latest book, co-authored with Mike Caulfield, is 'Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Cognitive psychology
• Demography
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy

Selected publications

• Can Students Evaluate Online Sources? Learning From Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning

  Theory & Research in Social Education · 2018-01-08 · 496 citations

  articleSenior author

  To be an informed citizen in today’s information-rich environment, individuals must be able to evaluate information they encounter on the Internet. However, teachers currently have limited options if they want to assess students’ evaluations of digital content. In response, we created a range of short tasks that assess students’ civic online reasoning—the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information online. Assessments ranged from paper-and-pencil task…

  PublisherDOI

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

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2019-11-01 · 328 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Background/Context The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. Despite mounting attention to the problem of online misinformation and growing agreement that digital literacy efforts are important, prior research offers few concrete ideas about what skilled evaluations look like. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Our purpose in this study was…

  PublisherDOI

• Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

  2018-01-01 · 194 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Let's start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become cliches: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the internet always at our fingertips, what's a teacher of history to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can't stick to the same old read-the…

  PublisherDOI

• Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait

  Educational Researcher · 2021 · 173 citations

  Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were…

  PublisherDOI

• Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2024-05-13 · 158 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joel Breakstone

  18 shared

• Mark D. Smith

  Stanford University

  13 shared

• Sarah McGrew

  University of Maryland, College Park

  10 shared

• Stephan Lewandowsky

  University of Bristol

  8 shared

• Teresa Ortega

  University of California, Davis

  8 shared

• Chauncey Monte‐Sano

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  7 shared

• Daisy Martin

  Arrowhead Regional Medical Center

  7 shared

• Suzanne M. Wilson

  Virginia Department of Health

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychological Studies in Education

  Stanford University

• Other

  Umeå University

• B.A.

  Brown University

• B.A.

  University of California, Berkeley

Awards & honors

• Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Coll…
• Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Co…
• UNESCO's 'Global Media and Information' award (2020)

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Carl Wiemanh-113
• John Mitchellh-90
• Rich Shavelsonh-82