Pacific Northwest tree octopus

[1][2] Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sources of information.

Leu et al. (2007) conducted an empirical study on 13-year old US school children's ability to critically evaluate online information for reliability.

[5][6] In the spring of 2017, Loos, Ivan & Leu (2018)[7] replicated the study in a Dutch school class of 27 children (13 girls and 14 boys, 11/12 years old) in the following way: The teacher and the school children were told by the first author of the study that the lesson that would follow would be an online reading comprehension exercise; the real purpose of the lesson was not revealed in advance.

Then, they were asked to answer the following questions: Hence, these school children thought the text was about their willingness to undertake action for an endangered animal.

[7] The setting of the task (school environment), the trust in their teacher and the scholar, and the emotional involvement (the topic was an animal in danger) might have made it more difficult for them to perceive the information on the website as fake.

Several told the scholar they were shocked that they had considered the digital information on the website to be reliable, as they had received several lessons in new literacy training at school over the past year.