TRUESEEKERThe Claim Record

For educators

Real claims make the best lessons

Every case on the record is a ready-made media-literacy lesson: a real claim students have probably seen, traced to what the evidence actually says. All of it is free to use in class under CC BY 4.0.

The distortion curriculum

Eleven ways claims get bent, each with a plain explanation and real examples. Teach one a week, or use them as a checklist students apply to their own feeds.

ExaggerationSubgroup generalizationSpecies extrapolationOmitted qualifierCausal overreachMarketing as evidenceQuote manipulationDate or context mismatchVisual manipulationFabricationTemporal overreach

Classroom activities

Place the needle

Show a claim, hide the verdict, and have students place it on the scale and defend their reasoning before the reveal. Daily Calibration runs this automatically.

Name the trick

Give students a claim and the taxonomy, and have them identify the distortion. Spot the Distortion is the same exercise, one a day.

Walk the chain

Hand out a printable study sheet and have students trace the claim to its primary source, deciding at each hop whether the meaning held.

Printable study sheets

Each sheet leads with discussion prompts, then the verdict, evidence, and source chain on one page. Open one and print to PDF.

Mostly accurateExperimental research indicates that one night of total sleep deprivation reduces performa…open sheet →
Partially accurate but misleadingSustained forward head posture, rounded shoulders and spinal "compression" cause muscle ov…open sheet →
Mostly accurateY Combinator has publicly released, under an MIT license, an agent system called QM that i…open sheet →
Mostly accurateTopical products marketed as fat burners (caffeine creams, capsaicin oropen sheet →
Source exists but framing is misleadingA 2025 study by Chourasia et al. at the Weizmann Institute of Science found that deleting …open sheet →
Partially accurate but misleadingA 2023 pilot randomized controlled trial in the journal Translational Psychiatry reported …open sheet →

Every case has a sheet at /case/ID/sheet, and the whole archive is downloadable from the data page.

For educators | TrueSeeker