Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Be Media Smart: A Collaborative Media Literacy Initiative For Ireland, Philip Russell

Conference Papers

This paper presents Ireland’s public awareness campaign – ‘Be Media Smart’- which was launched in Spring 2019 to combat misinformation and fake news and encourage people of all ages to stop, think, and check that information they see, read or hear across any media platform is reliable. Be Media Smart is an initiative of Media Literacy Ireland (MLI), an independent group facilitated by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) to enhance Irish people’s understanding of, and engagement with, media. Group members include large media and social media companies, Government bodies, libraries, academia and voluntary sector organisations.

The paper will provide …

Teaching News Literacy During A Pandemic: Adapting To The Virtual Learning Environment, R. Alan Berry, Jennifer L. Bonnet, Judith E. Rosenbaum

Library Staff Publications

In the fall of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered universities and sent much of higher education online, a team of media and information literacy experts at the University of Maine sought meaningful ways to collaboratively teach news literacy from a distance.

The result of their efforts was a weeklong virtual program, Friend, Enemy, or Frenemy? A News Literacy Challenge, open to anyone with an internet connection and an email address. This approach to remote learning scaffolded multiple literacies (critical media, news, and information) into five days, as participants examined different aspects of news production and consumption. The overall objective …

Exploring Adolescents’ Critical Thinking Aptitudes When Reading About Science In The News, Marianne Bissonnette, Pierre Chastenay, Chantal Francoeur

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This research studies the critical thinking skills of six teenagers in their final years of high school. It looks at the way those students use a set of cognitive skills in order to analyze scientific and pseudoscientific information available in online news articles. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six students chosen according to their results in a questionnaire about interest in science topics. Results show a large gap between participants’ use of critical thinking skills. Most of these skills were mainly used for text comprehension, evoking general knowledge, numeracy, arguments assessment and production, and life skills (open-mindedness and metacognition). The …

Improving College Students’ Fact-Checking Strategies Through Lateral Reading Instruction In A General Education Civics Course, Jessica E. Brodsky, Patricia J. Brooks, Donna Scimeca, Ralitsa Todorova, Peter Galati, Michael Batson, Robert Grosso, Michael Matthews, Victor Miller, Michael Caulfeld

Publications and Research

College students lack fact-checking skills, which may lead them to accept information at face value. We report findings from an institution participating in the Digital Polarization Initiative (DPI), a national effort to teach students lateral reading strategies used by expert fact-checkers to verify online information. Lateral reading requires users to leave the information (website) to find out whether someone has already fact-checked the claim, identify the original source, or learn more about the individuals or organizations making the claim. Instructor-matched sections of a general education civics course implemented the DPI curriculum (N=136 students) or provided business-as-usual civics instruction (N=94 students). …