When she helped to start a new charter school outside of Seattle last year, she didn't expect to teach students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was a hoax. Some children believed that the conspiracy fantasies were true. Over the past 10 to 20 years, misinformation has had a growing impact on students, yet many schools do not focus on the issue.
Children are ripe targets for fake news. According to a study published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, kids start believing in conspiratorial ideas at age 14. Teens have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. Less than 20 percent of high school students seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous radiation levels persisted in the area. More than two thirds of college students didn't notice that the liberal antigun groups behind the poll could have influenced the data when they looked at a poll on social media.
Young users are often steered toward misleading content by misinformation campaigns. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that YouTube's recommendation system is skewed to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer started with. When researchers searched for videos using the phrase "lunar eclipse", they were directed to a video suggesting that Earth is flat. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science associate professor spent time searching for videos on YouTube and observed what the app told her to watch next.
Schools can use media literacy education to deal with this problem. The idea is to teach kids how to evaluate and think critically about the messages they receive. School is a good place to teach children skills to evaluate claims that are not true.
Few American kids are receiving this instruction. Illinois became the first U.S. state to require high school students to take a media literacy class. There are laws in 13 other states that deal with media literacy, but the requirements can be as broad as putting a list of resources on an education department Web site. Howard Schneider is the executive director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony brook University and he says that a growing number of students are being taught some form of media literacy in college. When he began teaching college students, he found that they were already falling into bad habits.
There is disagreement about what the courses should teach even if more students take them. Some researchers argue that the practice of training students to give more weight to journalistic sources ignores the biases of publications and reporters. Other courses ask students to identify where information comes from and how it helps those spread it. There is very little data showing the best way to teach children how to tell fact from fiction.
Sam Wineburg, a professor of education at Stanford University, says that most media literacy approaches start to look thin when you ask. The director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island says that there are different groups behind each method. It is difficult to know which online sources to trust.
News literacy is a subset of media literacy research that deals with the propagation of conspiracy theories and the ability to discern real news from fake stories. People judge the reliability and credibility of news and information using a set of skills. Researchers have different ideas about how this type of news analysis should be taught.
The News Literacy Project teaches students to discern the quality of the information in part by learning how responsible journalism works. They study how journalists pursue news, how to distinguish between different kinds of information, and how to judge evidence behind reported stories. Schneider wrote in a 2007 article for Nieman Reports that the goal was to shape students into consumers who could differentiate between unmediated information and online journalism.
Some media literacy scholars don't think these approaches work. The 2010 paper written by Hobbs argued that these methods do little to instill critical thinking skills, and that all that focus on the ideals of journalism is just propaganda.
Other approaches teach students how to evaluate the credibility of news and information sources by determining the goals and incentives of those sources. Students are taught to ask who created the content and why. What do other sources say? These methods are new and have not been studied.
The lack of rigorous studies of the different approaches is a major roadblock. He is the principal investigator of the mapping impactful media literacy practices initiative, a research project supported by the National Association for Media Literacy Education. He says it is very qualitative. There is a lack of clarity about what the goals are.
Researchers looked at how well students who took the undergraduate course answered certain questions a year later compared with students who did not. Students who had taken the class were more likely to correctly answer questions about the news media. The program inoculates students against false news, but the study didn't test how well the students could discern it.
The small amount of research that does exist has mostly been done with college students. The various approaches that are being used in the classrooms have not been tested. The heads of all major organizations that are part of the National Media Literacy Alliance were interviewed by Mihailidis and his team.
Wineburg is trying to fill in the research gaps. Wineburg and his team compared the work of 10 history professors, 10 journalism fact-checkers and 25 college students in a study published in 2019. They found that journalism fact-checkers were not fooled by Web sites. Historians and students tried to assess the validity of Web sites by reading vertically, navigating within a site to learn more about it, but fact-checkers read horizontally, opening new browser tabs for different sources and running searches to judge the original.
Wineburg and his team collaborated with the Poynter Institute and the Local Media Association to create a civic online reasoning course that teaches students to evaluate information by reading. The effects look promising so far. In a field experiment involving 40,000 high school students in urban public health districts, Wineburg and his group found that students who took the class became better able to evaluate Web sites and the credibility of online claims, such as Facebook posts, compared with students who did not take the class.
Even if news literacy education teaches specific skills, some researchers question its broader, longer-term impact. How confident can we be that students will retain their skills once they learn how to evaluate Web sites and claims? Can we be certain that these methods will make students skeptical of conspiracy theories? Will these methods lead students to become civically engaged members of society?
There is research that suggests news literacy approaches could have beneficial effects. The study found that people who were more media literate were less likely to support conspiracy theories.
Some experts worry that a focus only on evaluating Web sites and news articles is too narrow. Students should be thinking about why the news is being told in a particular way, whose stories are being told and whose are not, and how the information is getting to the news consumer.
Some approaches to media literacy don't work and might actually backfire by increasing students' cynicism or misunderstandings about the way news is reported. Students may begin to read all kinds of sinister motives into everything, according to Danah boyd, a technology scholar at Microsoft Research and founder and president of the Data and Society research institute. Jordan Russell, a high school social studies teacher, argued that although it is good to ask students to challenge their assumptions, the hole that opens up can be filled in deeply problematic ways.
To avoid these potential problems, she advocates for broad approaches that help students develop mindsets in which they become comfortable with uncertainty. Students go through various stages of learning according to WilliamPerry of Harvard University. First children think there are correct and wrong answers. They realize that knowledge can be contextual. This stage can be dangerous. Russell says that people can come to believe that there is no truth. When students think everything is a lie, they think there is no point in engaging with difficult topics.
The goal with news literacy education is to get students to the next level, where they can see and appreciate the world is messy.
Schools have a long way to go before they get there. One big challenge is how to expand these programs so they reach everyone, especially kids in lower-income school districts, who are less likely to receive any news literacy instruction at all. We desperately need professional development and training and support for educators because they have so much material to impart.
The Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act would authorize the Department of Education to create a grant program to help states develop and fund media literacy education initiatives. If America's young people are going to learn how to navigate this new and constantly evolving media landscape with their wits about them, more investment in this kind of education is critical. It is necessary to understand how to get them there. Schneider plans to conduct a trial soon to determine how his course shapes the development of news literacy, civic engagement and critical thinking skills among students in middle school and high school.
Many more studies are needed to understand what works and what doesn't over the long term. Schneider says that education scholars need to take an ambitious step forward. We are in the middle of the most profound revolution in 500 years.
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