At Palmer High School in Colorado Springs, juniors in several history and U.S. government classes are taught to defend themselves against misinformation.
The students, many of them on the verge of voting age, spend up to two weeks each fall exploring how prejudice and biases can be found in the many places they get information. To trace the origins of documents, to verify a website by leaving it to consult other sources, and to train a critical eye on the claims made by TikTok celebrities are some of the things they learn to do.
"With students and adults alike, it's easy to look at stuff on social media and take it as it is and not question it." It can be hard to push through that apathy.
With young people spending more time online, where misleading and false narratives swirl around the upcoming elections, and other topics, education is trying to offer protection. Using techniques updated for the digital age, they are teaching students that content can be faked or manipulated and that a.org domain does not make a website trustworthy.
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The teacher at Palmer High School is trying to show how to distinguish between good and bad information. What is their point of view? Is it a good idea to use Wikipedia?
Several educational groups representing more than 350,000 teachers in math, social studies and other disciplines formed an alliance to support those teaching media literacy after being alarmed by the surge of misinformation online. The National Association for Media Literacy Education has seen its membership more than double in the past five years.
Legislators have tried to improve media literacy in schools. According to the nonprofit group Media Literacy Now, five states, including Colorado, have passed language that requires education departments to take steps to provide literacy resources and revise learning standards. Legislative endorsements of the need for literacy education are present in many of the laws. Illinois is the only state that requires high school students to be taught how to access and analyze media.
Without an explicit mandate from lawmakers, some schools are struggling to integrate media literacy into their curriculum. Most of the time, those that teach it use outdated checklists instead of integrating them into core subjects.
If young students fail to recognize rhetorical red flags and fall prey to confirmation bias online, there are dangers that media and information literacy advocates can't ignore.
Jimmeka Anderson is the founder of the youth focused group I AM not the MEdia. It is a necessity for the way we live because we all engage in this online space.
The students were asked to evaluate several types of content. They didn't do as well as they could. A website that claimed to offer facts about climate science was actually linked to the fossil fuel industry. 98% of the students were deceived.
Sam Wineburg, one of the researchers, said that the findings suggest that a lot of students need help learning to read. He and other researchers suggest that students be taught to read beyond the website.
The majority of children and adolescents surveyed didn't know that websites promoting the preservation of imaginary animals were hoaxes. Nearly half of young adults shared misinformation because they thought it was true, while a third did so impulsively, according to a global study. According to the research, many people felt pressured to weigh in on a current event because they were too busy.
Gilligan studied in Maynard, a small town in Massachusetts. According to Ms. Gilligan, 47 percent of students in her school district don't talk to their parents about the trustworthiness of their media sources. The majority of seniors were taught that media companies make money by selling attention.
95 percent of seniors said they had done a research project that required them to gather information from multiple sources.
Ms. Gilligan, who worked on the survey with the nonprofit group Media Literacy Now and the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, realized that she was one of her primary sources of information.
She said that people were angry at anyone who believed differently than them when she was younger. A lot of that came from the fact that we had a one-sided view of the issues.
Ms. Gilligan will be voting for the first time in the elections. Many instructors believe that media literacy education should begin in middle or elementary school when children are just starting to use the internet.
Efforts have been made to appeal to younger students. The National Association for Media Literacy Education used a video game theme for its "Level Up" conference in July which featured graphics modeled after the Super Mario video game franchise. In Interland, a robot explores digital worlds that flow with fact and fiction.
Timothy Krueger has been teaching history to teenagers in upstate New York since 2004. There was a fake TikTok conspiracy theory about Helen Keller. Some people said they weren'tvaccinated against Covid-19 because their parents told them the vaccine would make them infertile.
There are more lessons about evaluating evidence and fact-checking. The pilot program he helped design with the American Federation of Teachers will be piloted in Cleveland in November.
Mr. Krueger said that teachers are afraid to talk about controversial issues in an open society.
He said that teachers should show young people how to think clearly for themselves.
There are new educational efforts being put in place. Pre-bunking initiatives are things that are done to warn users about misinformation. According to the News Literacy Project, the number of students using its free Checkology curriculum has increased by more than 200 percent in the last four years.
Peter Adams, a former teacher who heads research and design for the News Literacy Project, wants a broader consensus on the skills students should learn. He's worried that lessons could go wrong without it.
He said that some methods in schools suggest that students should question everything they see with skepticism. This can cause young people to conclude that all sources of information are equally suspect or even worse, to inflame a kind of nihilism, that all sources of information are out to manipulate them.
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