Students’ evaluation of a serious game to foster the ability to detect fake news

Abstract

In recent years, misinformation has emerged as a social and educational concern. Research has shown that students in High School, and even College, have difficulties detecting fake news. For that reason, we designed and implemented a serious game to be used as an educational resource to enhance misinformation detection. The game consists of a narrative story which fosters users to assess some features of news, like authors’ credibility, quality of the evidence or possible conflict of interest, to progress in the game. This paper presents a comparison between the evaluation of two samples: undergraduate and adolescent students. We also focus on potential gender differences. Results show that both groups appreciate the game, but undergraduate students’ and girls’ assessments are more positive. Moreover, they all felt that they have learnt to detect fake news.