Chapter Three: "What the Research Says About Students' Media Literacy"

by Michelle Luhtala and Jacquelyn Whiting

Interest in fake news exploded during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Simultaneously, educators were issued an apolitical call to action by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). This group, which brought us the "Reading Like a Historian" curriculum, published its research that measured the capacity of learners, grade six through higher education, to evaluate information. The executive summary for the 2015-16 study, "Evaluating Information: the Cornerstone of Civic Online reasoning," uses words such as "bleak" and describes researchers' reaction as "appalled" when describing students' ability to unpack sources of information and determine fake from real, and fact from propaganda. The study's designers had to redraft a few of the research instrument's tasks, because students so drastically underperformed in the pilot (Stanford).

As a consequence of its findings, SHEG offered the following recommendations to educators of students at all grade levels:

• Students as early as elementary school must learn how to distinguish online ad content from news content (p. 10).
• Students should learn to question everything they read, hear, and see in the media. For media consumers, healthy skepticism is healthy (p. 17).
• Students should be taught how to consume news delivered through social media outlets (p. 23).

That last point was reinforced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's first of Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy:

The Internet has democratized information. News outlets, think tanks, and non-profits are as likely (if not more so) to post their video stories and documentaries to YouTube channels as they are to host them on their own websites. We must question and accept the validity of information based on more critical and thorough examination than just its format.

This should be great news (no pun intended) to the 62 percent of Americans who, according to the Pew Research Center, get their news from social media sources (Gottfried). It is possible to be both a social media junky and an informed citizen. Possible, but without critical reading skills, is it likely?

The list of people and organizations concerned about students' ability to make meaning of the flood of information they receive keeps growing. In February 2017, the Civic Engagement Research Group further validated the need to teach media literacy skills in K–12 education. Their study demonstrated that youth who described themselves as having media literacy training were more apt to detect misinformation than those who did not. "In short, the general concern for preparing youth to judge the accuracy of truth claims, such as the broader concern for the democratic purposes of schooling, should not be confined to a single priority such as media literacy. Rather, these findings highlight dynamics worthy of study in multiple domains," the study concluded (Kahne).

In a March 27 Washington Post article about confusion among news consumers, Frank Sesno, a former CNN reporter and anchor who now runs George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, was quoted as saying, "One of the dangers is thinking that people know the difference between the editorial page and the front page, between a commentator or pundit commenting on something alongside a reporter who's supposed to be providing facts. In this environment, when you have news, talking points, and opinions all colliding, it can be really disorienting to the audience" (Farhi). Add to that infotainment. How many people got their news from the likes of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and now from Trevor Noah and John Oliver?

At all levels of the educational spectrum educators have identified the need for increased critical thinking about sources of information. Before the SHEG report was released, before the 2016 election, University of Washington Professors Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West began developing a one-credit course, "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data." Their course title and expression of the course objectives might be pejorative, but they are valid.

Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to:

• Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
• Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
• Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
• Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
• Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.

We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education (Bergstrom and West).

On their course website you can find their lectures and other course resources, and you can follow them on social media for updates.

Remember that fake news is nothing new, and, in fact, our focus on it can lead us astray. If only fake news is being discussed when students are researching, then teachers and students are focusing on the wrong thing. Recognizing fake news doesn't even qualify for Band-Aid status on the spectrum of media literacy challenges. Research is a process, and students often get through high school without learning it. They frequently approach research tasks knowing what they "want to say"—and then finding resources that support that. When they do this, they miss the point of research altogether, which is to:

• explore a concept.
• formulate a line of inquiry out of initial discoveries.
• deepen knowledge by investigating multiple perspectives on the subject.
• document developing learning.
• synthesize learning into an original idea.
• articulate and publish that idea.
• incorporate new learning into their knowledge base for reflection and future retrieval and consultation.

These ideas are borne out by New York Times journalist Sarah Maslin Nir. During the "New York Times Learning Network" webinar on May 10, 2017, Nir remarked: "The way I see the world is the tip of the iceberg," and this sentiment is true for us all; our challenge is to see the tip of the iceberg and then dive deep to see the whole thing! During the webinar, Nir went on to say that when we approach a story or research we should, "come with a thesis but hold it loosely." Remain open to possibilities. Finally, Nir described the process of researching and writing her New York City nail salon expose, "The Price of Nice Nails". After initially being told that as a freelance journalist she didn't have the time for that kind of story, she renewed her request to investigate the plight of nail salon workers once she was hired as a full-time staffer. She initially took one month to research the story and present her findings to her editor. She was then told to take a year and continue working which she did because, as she said, "you have to invest in truth."

Nir's directive to journalists applies to news consumers as well. We all must invest in separating truth from fiction, information from persuasion, and reality from intentional deception. To be courageous, active citizens, students understand the role of the free press in democratic society as well as their role as news consumers. To do that, they must learn and remember these fundamental elements of media:

1. All media messages are constructed.
2. Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.
3. Different people experience the same message differently.
4. Media have embedded values and points of view.
5. Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power.

And in order to recognize these elements in the onslaught of media they receive every day, they must internalize these questions in order to think critically about the information they encounter:

1. Who created this message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?
4. What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in; or omitted from, this message?
5. Why is this message being sent?

There is a growing body of resources for this examination. Common Sense Media has long been a repository of tools and resources for developing media literacy and digital citizenship. In one of their articles about spotting fake news they offered these general recommendations for students:

• Look for unusual URLs or site names, including those that end with ".co" -- these are often trying to appear like legitimate news sites, but they aren't.
• Look for signs of low quality, such as words in all caps, headlines with glaring grammatical errors, bold claims with no sources, and sensationalist images (women in bikinis are popular clickbait on fake news sites). These are clues that you should be skeptical of the source.
• Check a site's "About Us" section. Find out who supports the site or who is associated with it. If this information doesn't exist -- and if the site requires that you register before you can learn anything about its backers -- you have to wonder why they aren't being transparent.
• Check Snopes, Wikipedia, and Google before trusting or sharing news that seems too good (or bad) to be true.
• Consider whether other credible, mainstream news outlets are reporting the same news. If they're not, it doesn't mean it's not true, but it does mean you should dig deeper.
• Check your emotions. Clickbait and fake news strive for extreme reactions. If the news you're reading makes you really angry or super smug, it could be a sign that you're being played. Check multiple sources before trusting (Filucci).

The remaining chapters in this book explain the research process we used with our students and provide easy-to-replicate lesson ideas for each stage of the research process. The focus of these lessons is on developing student's critical reading and media literacy skills. Where possible, we have reproduced images and frequently we direct you to create digital media snapshots because visual literacy is a key component of digital media literacy. In some cases respect for intellectual property rights and copyright protections have prevented including images in this publication, although you are still able to replicate or project them for classroom use. We encourage you, in the context of your classrooms and libraries, to seek out these images for your students to examine.

References

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin West. "Syllabus." Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data, University of Washington, callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Farhi, Paul. "Sean Hannity thinks viewers can tell the difference between news and opinion. Hold on a moment." The Washington Post, 28 March 2017. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/sean-hannity-thinks-viewers-can-tell-the-difference-between-news-and-opinion-hold-on-a-moment/2017/03/27/eb0c5870-1307-11e7-9e4f-09aa75d3ec57_story.html.

Filucci, Sarah. "How to Spot Fake News (and Teach Kids to Be Media-Savvy)." Parenting, Media, and Everything In Between, CommonSense Media, 20 March 2017. commonsensemedia.org/blog/how-to-spot-fake-news-and-teach-kids-to-be-media-savvy.

"Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy." Communication and Information, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017. unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/media-development/media-literacy/five-laws-of-mil/. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Gottfried, Jeffery and Elisa Shearer. "News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016." Pew Research Center: Journalism and Media, 26 May 2016. journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016.

Kahne, Joseph and Benjamin Bowyer. "Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age: Confronting the Challenges of Motivated Reasoning and Misinformation." American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 54, No. 1, Feb. 2017, pp. 3–34. civicsurvey.org/sites/default/files/publications/Educating_for_Democracy_in_a_Partisan_Age.pdf.

Wineburg, Sam and Sarach McGrew, Joel Breakstone, and Teresa Ortega. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt5934.