📚 Reading apps and reading coaches · 🏫 Classroom tools
Civic Online Reasoning
By Digital Inquiry Group. Visit Civic Online Reasoning
Desk research from the maker's own pages. Not yet tried by us. Checked 2026-10-24.
A free curriculum of lessons and assessments that teach students to judge online information the way professional fact checkers do. Students practice lateral reading (leaving a site to see what others say about it), click restraint and checking evidence, using real websites, videos and social posts. Teachers download lesson collections for history, civics and science classes. It grew out of the Stanford History Education Group's research.
Our take: Among the stronger free options for teaching teens to check what they read online; parents wanting a self-paced app for kids will need to adapt it.
| Ages it suits | about 11-18 (middle school to college) |
|---|---|
| What its terms say about age | No student accounts; teachers sign up for a free account to download materials. The privacy policy says the group does not knowingly collect personal information from minors under 16. (terms) |
| Price | Free. Free lessons and assessments; donations welcome (Oct 2026) |
| Works on | Web |
| Account | A school account |
| Ads | None |
| In-app purchases | None |
| The AI in it | No AI |
What's good
- Free and research-based
- Teaches habits that also apply to AI-generated content
- Short lessons fit into existing classes
Watch for
- Teacher sign-up needed to download
- Studies come from the makers' own team
- Needs a teacher to lead
Data and privacy
The privacy policy covers teacher accounts and site cookies; it says the group does not knowingly collect data from minors under 16 and does not sell data of known under-16s without opt-in. Read the privacy policy.
Does it work?
Peer-reviewed studies by the curriculum's own team, including a cluster-randomized field study in an urban district (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2022) where students grew in judging online sources, and a 2023 AERA Open study of lessons across subjects.
In the Big Index
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Where these facts come from
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/research/
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/research/lateral-reading-on-the-open-internet/
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/research/aera-open-2023/
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/about/
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/curriculum/?tab=collections
- https://cor.inquirygroup.org/curriculum/lessons/intro-to-lateral-reading/
- https://inquirygroup.org/privacy-policy
Prices, terms and features change. Nobody paid to be listed, nothing here is an affiliate link, and Peabody never rates itself. Where we and the maker disagree, the maker's own pages are the ones to trust.