I study the effect of a debate and argumentation program on students' ability to reason, and to successfully identify fake news. In a field setting, Czech high schools, I find no effect on either reasoning ability or news literacy. Using a post-intervention survey and interviews with teachers, I identify three possible reasons why teaching "correct" argumentation may backfire: 1) student overconfidence in their baseline abilities, 2) lack of motivation of students to engage with difficult material, and 3) student inability to apply the material in practice.

With these three issue in mind, I design a follow-up lab experiment to replicate my field findings. I provide a feedback mechanism with monetary incentives to counter both overconfidence and lack of motivation, and restructure the learning materials to include more practical examples. I deepen the analysis by exploring the (lack of) argumentative skills of students with unusually extreme opinions on topics covered in the articles assigned for analysis, as field experiment results suggest these students could systematically differ from their peers both in their abilities and in their motivation to apply their skills.

[Lab experiment data pending; will be available for the conference.]