In the process of writing the Action Research paper, there were several challenges that were met, foremost of which was the indecisiveness as to what line of questioning to pursue or what specific thread in the myriad of topics on Fake News and Disinformation this writer should pursue. There was the option (and possibly the easiest route) of just making a case analysis or comparison study of the available studies on Fake News and Disinformation; and conducting a survey of habits or skills higher education students use when evaluating if what they read online is fake news or not. I made several revisions to the title as I was going through the process of writing the body of the paper, then decided on the catchy title, “Demystifying Disinformation.”  I remember during one of the lectures where it was mentioned that at times, the title becomes clearer towards the end of writing an action research paper.  True enough, it materialized much later, and up until the last moment before  I was to present my paper in class, I still was tweaking and fine-tuning and scrambling for additional information through peer-reviewed articles that I can add to justify my position. I decided on adding a catchy phrase to the title to make it eye-catching and invite readers to delve into my research deeper. I realized how tedious and time consuming writing the paper can be, as it took me more than a month from the conceptualization phase to the writing of the paper, not including the results of the survey which will have to be included in a later course. The unintended effect of this research was that I did not expect that the studies I have read would invalidate my initial hypothesis. When I started my research on the topic, I was almost convinced that having higher education students as my respondents would guarantee positive results with regard to identifying fake news on Facebook, as higher ed students are trained to be critical thinkers. The more I read journal articles on the subject, the more it is that my position tended to slide over to the opposite side, as the studies confirm that unless critical thinking is exercised on the regular, people who are exposed to disinformation and who may already reside in echo chambers or experience some form of cognitive bias (e.g., the Dunning-Kruger effect). This information in hand, I proceeded to shift my assumption to align with the facts as proven by my research–that unless higher education students exercise critical thinking skills on a regular basis, and barring the presence of cognitive biases, higher ed students will never be able to 100% identify fake news as fake. 

Some educational issues that arose in the process of my practice were that I did not take into account the cognitive biases that surround the decision making and judgment capabilities of respondents in identifying fake news. As for the questions in the survey I prepared, I feel that I could do better and fine-tune them to add determinants of cognitive bias to sort out data better, and that it will be necessary to add more questions in this regard. Due to the constraints of not being able to conduct the survey, I am unable to sufficiently answer my research questions, hence I could only write an assumption based on what I have gathered from research thus far.