The Stanford study confirms what many teachers know to be true: Today’s students are not prepared to deal with the flood of information coming at them from their various digital devices. The researchers say they collected 7,804 student responses. To do this, they designed 56 different assessments for students in middle schools, high schools, and colleges across 12 states. The experiment was part of a larger study conducted by researchers from Stanford University’s History Education Group (HEG), who set out to measure what they called “civic online reasoning”-that is, young people’s ability to judge the credibility of the information they find online. (As an aside, the photo was indeed real-but scientists say it’s unlikely the malformations were caused by radiation.) And yet, when asked whether the photo provided evidence that the Fukushima nuclear explosion caused malformations in daisies, nearly 40% of the students said yes.

It was posted on Imgur, a photo-sharing platform, by a user with the handle “pleasegoogleShakerAamerpleasegoogleDavidKelly.” It had no attribution as to the photographer, original publisher, or location.

The image looked sketchy, to say the least.

In 2015, 170 American high-school students were asked a simple question: Does the photo provide evidence that the caption is true?

Hoax websites for elementary students