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Fostering Information and Media Literacy for students

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Fostering Information and Media Literacy for students

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In fostering information and media literacy among students, several key competencies are crucial to equip them with the skills needed to navigate today's information-rich environment. Firstly, critical thinking skills play a pivotal role. Students must learn to approach information with a discerning eye, questioning sources, biases, and the validity of content. As an educator, I see critical thinking as the top priority within information literacy, enabling students to sift through the vast array of data available and make informed, reasoned judgments.

Secondly, research skills are essential for students to effectively gather and evaluate information. The ability to conduct thorough research, distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources, and synthesize information is foundational. As an instructor, I emphasize the importance of honing research skills not only for academic success but also for preparing students to be lifelong learners capable of navigating an ever-evolving information landscape.

Digital literacy is another key competency in the modern age. Students need to be proficient in using technology for information retrieval and communication. This includes understanding digital platforms, assessing the credibility of online sources, and navigating the ethical implications of digital interactions. From my perspective, digital literacy is not just a technical skill but a fundamental aspect of being an informed and responsible citizen in the digital era.

Moreover, media literacy is indispensable for students to comprehend the construction of media messages and their potential impact. This competency involves analyzing media content critically, recognizing biases, and understanding how media shapes perceptions. As an educator, I believe that fostering media literacy is crucial for empowering students to engage with media responsibly and thoughtfully.

Lastly, ethical information use is a competency that cannot be overlooked. Students must understand the ethical considerations of using information, including proper citation, avoiding plagiarism, and respecting intellectual property rights. Instilling a sense of ethical responsibility in information use is not only essential for academic integrity but also for preparing students to contribute positively to a society that values honesty and integrity.

In essence, these competencies collectively form the foundation of information and media literacy. As an instructor, my perspective is grounded in the belief that cultivating these skills goes beyond academic achievement; it empowers students to be discerning, responsible, and active participants in a world inundated with information.

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Emphasize the importance of assessing the credibility of sources. Teach students to identify reliable sources by considering the author's expertise, the publication's reputation, and the presence of citations and references. Encourage them to cross-reference information across multiple reliable sources.

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020

The word "literacy" usually describes the ability to read and write. Reading literacy and media literacy have a lot in common. Reading starts with recognizing letters. Pretty soon, readers can identify words -- and, most importantly, understand what those words mean. Readers then become writers. With more experience, readers and writers develop strong literacy skills. ( Learn specifically about news literacy.)

Media literacy is the ability to identify different types of media and understand the messages they're sending. Kids take in a huge amount of information from a wide array of sources, far beyond the traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) of most parents' youth. There are text messages, memes, viral videos, social media, video games, advertising, and more. But all media shares one thing: Someone created it. And it was created for a reason. Understanding that reason is the basis of media literacy. ( Learn how to use movies and TV to teach media literacy.)

The digital age has made it easy for anyone to create media. We don't always know who created something, why they made it, and whether it's credible. This makes media literacy tricky to learn and teach. Nonetheless, media literacy is an essential skill in the digital age.

Specifically, it helps kids:

Learn to think critically. As kids evaluate media, they decide whether the messages make sense, why certain information was included, what wasn't included, and what the key ideas are. They learn to use examples to support their opinions. Then they can make up their own minds about the information based on knowledge they already have.

Become a smart consumer of products and information. Media literacy helps kids learn how to determine whether something is credible. It also helps them determine the "persuasive intent" of advertising and resist the techniques marketers use to sell products.

Recognize point of view. Every creator has a perspective. Identifying an author's point of view helps kids appreciate different perspectives. It also helps put information in the context of what they already know -- or think they know.

Create media responsibly. Recognizing your own point of view, saying what you want to say how you want to say it, and understanding that your messages have an impact is key to effective communication.

Identify the role of media in our culture. From celebrity gossip to magazine covers to memes, media is telling us something, shaping our understanding of the world, and even compelling us to act or think in certain ways.

Understand the author's goal. What does the author want you to take away from a piece of media? Is it purely informative, is it trying to change your mind, or is it introducing you to new ideas you've never heard of? When kids understand what type of influence something has, they can make informed choices.

When teaching your kids media literacy, it's not so important for parents to tell kids whether something is "right." In fact, the process is more of an exchange of ideas. You'll probably end up learning as much from your kids as they learn from you.

Media literacy includes asking specific questions and backing up your opinions with examples. Following media-literacy steps allows you to learn for yourself what a given piece of media is, why it was made, and what you want to think about it.

Teaching kids media literacy as a sit-down lesson is not very effective; it's better incorporated into everyday activities. For example:

With little kids, you can discuss things they're familiar with but may not pay much attention to. Examples include cereal commercials, food wrappers, and toy packages.

With older kids, you can talk through media they enjoy and interact with. These include such things as YouTube videos, viral memes from the internet, and ads for video games.

Here are the key questions to ask when teaching kids media literacy:

Who created this? Was it a company? Was it an individual? (If so, who?) Was it a comedian? Was it an artist? Was it an anonymous source? Why do you think that?

Why did they make it? Was it to inform you of something that happened in the world (for example, a news story)? Was it to change your mind or behavior (an opinion essay or a how-to)? Was it to make you laugh (a funny meme)? Was it to get you to buy something (an ad)? Why do you think that?

Who is the message for? Is it for kids? Grown-ups? Girls? Boys? People who share a particular interest? Why do you think that?

What techniques are being used to make this message credible or believable? Does it have statistics from a reputable source? Does it contain quotes from a subject expert? Does it have an authoritative-sounding voice-over? Is there direct evidence of the assertions its making? Why do you think that?

What details were left out, and why? Is the information balanced with different views -- or does it present only one side? Do you need more information to fully understand the message? Why do you think that?

How did the message make you feel? Do you think others might feel the same way? Would everyone feel the same, or would certain people disagree with you? Why do you think that?

As kids become more aware of and exposed to news and current events, you can apply media-literacy steps to radio, TV, and online information.

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What is media literacy, and why is it important?

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What is media literacy, and why is it important? - Learn more and get Common Sense Media's research-backed tips.

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Encourage students to question everything. Teach them to critically evaluate information by asking who created it, what purpose it serves, and whether there is any bias present. Foster a habit of skepticism that prompts them to verify information before accepting it as true.

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Provide guidance on analyzing media messages. Help students recognize the potential for bias in different media formats and understand how certain narratives or images may be constructed to influence perceptions. Media literacy education enables students to be more discerning consumers of information.

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Foster interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Encourage students to draw on knowledge from various disciplines to assess information critically. A holistic understanding of different subjects enhances their ability to identify inconsistencies or inaccuracies in information.

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Introduce students to fact-checking tools and websites. Teach them how to use these resources to verify claims and statements. Encourage a habit of fact-checking before sharing information or forming opinions, emphasizing the importance of accuracy in the digital age.

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Train students in effective research methods. Teach them how to navigate academic databases, evaluate the reliability of online sources, and synthesize information from multiple perspectives. Proficient research skills contribute to a more thorough understanding of topics and help identify misinformation.

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Create an open classroom environment that encourages discussions and debates. Engaging in conversations about current events and various topics allows students to hear different perspectives and challenge their own beliefs. This practice helps them refine their critical thinking skills and develop a nuanced understanding of issues.

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Emphasize the importance of ethical information use. Teach students to recognize and avoid plagiarism, as well as to attribute information appropriately. Instilling a sense of responsibility in information use contributes to a culture of integrity and trust.

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Why do students easily believe false info?

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Why do students easily believe false info?

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In the digital age, students are bombarded with content from various sources, making it challenging to discern credible information from falsehoods. The sheer quantity can lead to cognitive overload, prompting individuals to accept information at face value without critically evaluating its authenticity.

Another contributing factor is the influence of social and peer dynamics. Students often rely on social networks and online communities for information sharing and validation. Misinformation can spread rapidly within these networks, creating an echo chamber where individuals reinforce each other's beliefs without subjecting information to critical scrutiny. The desire for social acceptance and conformity can override the inclination to question the accuracy of information.

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False Information: In the past, elementary school curricula have sometimes presented Christopher Columbus as a heroic explorer who discovered America, overlooking the negative impact of colonization on Indigenous populations. This narrative simplifies a complex historical reality and perpetuates a Eurocentric perspective.

Real Facts: A more accurate and inclusive approach acknowledges the diverse cultures and civilizations that existed in the Americas before Columbus. Providing a nuanced understanding of history helps students grasp the complexities of colonization and its effects on Indigenous communities.

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Advertisement

Don't believe everything you learned in elementary school. Our rose-colored image of Christopher Columbus, daring discoverer of America, is largely based on Washington Irving's 1828 biography, "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus," much of which was invented. The real history of Columbus is far more complicated, controversial - and interesting.

Let's dispel some of the most pervasive myths about the divisive figure of Christopher Columbus, starting with how people viewed the world in the 15th century.

1. Columbus Set Out to Prove the World Was Round

Contrary to what Irving wrote in his biography, Columbus was not a solitary geographical genius surrounded by a bunch of flat-Earthers. The fact that Earth is round was well-established in 15th-century scientific circles. What was still unknown was the size of the planet.

Columbus's gamble was that the Earth was really small. He calculated that the distance from Spain to Japan, sailing West, was only 2,400 miles. In fact, it's closer to 11,000 miles and there are two continents in the way. Not only was Columbus wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but he thought it was pear-shaped instead of a sphere.

2. Columbus Was Italian

This is a touchy subject, since Italian-Americans are some of Columbus's greatest supporters and defenders. But if we're going to be historically accurate, Columbus couldn't have been Italian, because Italy wasn't a thing until 1861.

Columbus was born in Genoa, a port city in the northern region of Liguria in modern-day Italy. But the Kingdom of Italy wasn't unified until 1861, more than 350 years after Columbus sailed to America. In Columbus's day, Genoa was an independent republic with its own language and currency. Complicating matters was that Columbus left Genoa early and made his name in Portugal and Spain.

Italian-Americans latched on to Columbus in the late 19th century to combat virulent discrimination against Italian immigrants. Italian-American communities in cities like San Francisco began holding annual Columbus Day parades to celebrate an American hero with Italian heritage, and to promote Italian contributions to American society and culture.

3. Columbus Discovered America

Ask any random first-grader, "Who discovered America?" and they'll proudly tell you it was Christopher Columbus. Heck, ask most 50-year-olds and they'll give the same answer. But there are several serious problems with that claim.

Even if we ignore the fact that millions of indigenous people had lived in the land now known as North America for more than 10,000 years before Columbus "discovered" it, Columbus was still not the first European to make landfall in the New World. Historians and archeologists agree that Viking explorers and possibly Leif Erikson himself established colonies along the eastern coast of Canada as early as the 10th century.

But even if you ignore both the indigenous issue and the Viking claims, you're still stuck with the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America. Columbus's first expedition landed on a small island in the Bahamas Oct. 12, 1492. Subsequent expeditions came ashore in Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola, among other islands. While these islands are most certainly part of "the Americas," none of Columbus's expeditions found what most Americans would consider "America."

4. Columbus's Ships Were the Niña, Pinta and the Santa Maria

Well, this one is only half false. Columbus and his crew may have called the three ships the Niña, Pinta and the Santa Maria, but those were probably just nicknames.

The Niña was not the ship's official name. The small caravel-style vessel was originally called the Santa Clara, but dubbed the Niña ("girl" in Spanish) by the sailors in homage to the ship's owner, Juan Niño. No one knows what the original name of the Pinta was, but some historians speculate that nickname was short for la pintada or "the painted lady," a possible reference to a prostitute.

For the Santa Maria, one story is that it was a name given by Columbus to a ship originally called la Gallega or Santa Gallega because its owner was from the Spanish region of Galicia. The more colorful explanation is that the "saintly" name is another nod to a favorite prostitute named Maria Galante.

5. Columbus Thought He Had Discovered a New Continent

Nope. Columbus had no idea that he had accidentally found the edge of two massive continents equaling nearly 40 percent of the world's total landmass. Instead, he died convinced that he had discovered a Western sailing route to Asia or the "East Indies." That's why he called the local indigenous tribes "Indians," of course.

Instead of thinking that he had discovered some truly unknown "New World," Columbus believed that he had merely landed on some Asian islands that hadn't been described by Marco Polo. Incredibly, Columbus came this close to being the first European in South America, but he mistook the coast of Venezuela for mainland China and wasn't interested in pursuing it further.

6. Columbus Was a Genocidal Murderer

In recent decades, Columbus has been vilified by critics who blame him for the eventual deaths of millions of native people who contracted European diseases or fell to the sword of conquistadors and colonists. While that's a lot of death to place on the shoulders of one man, Columbus's direct interactions with the Taíno natives on Hispaniola were also disastrous.

It's estimated that 300,000 Taíno lived on Hispaniola in 1492. Just 16 years later, that number had dwindled to 60,000. By 1548, only 500 remained, according to Columbus biographer Laurence Bergreen. As many as 50,000 are believed to have committed mass suicide rather than to live under Spanish rule.

Columbus's fiercest critics label him a murderer who willfully committed genocide. Kris Lane, a historian of colonial Latin America, disagrees. Lane recognizes Columbus's personal crimes, which included rounding up and selling natives as slaves, and working some Taíno to death in gold mines. But he doesn't believe that Columbus was intent on wiping the Indians out, even if that was the result.

"Was Columbus an active protector of Native Americans?" wrote Lane in the Washington Post. "No. Did he wish to eliminate them? No. Did genocide directly result from his decrees and his family's commercial aims? Yes."

7. Columbus Was a Respected and Beloved Leader

It wasn't just American Indians who suffered under Columbus. Even if we include the caveat that he was "a man of his time," it's hard to dismiss the evidence that he was a tyrannical and even cruel leader who often imposed his will on his Spanish subjects through violence and fear tactics.

In " Columbus: The Four Voyages," author Lawrence Bergreen published firsthand accounts of Columbus's oppressive methods as the leader of the Spanish settlement on Hispaniola. He was fond of public beatings and whippings, cutting out a woman's tongue for "speaking ill" of Columbus and his brothers, hanging other Spaniards for stealing bread, and ordering vicious lashings for crimes as petty as not properly stocking Columbus's pantry.

When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sent an officer of the Spanish crown to assist Columbus, the man found a colony devolved into rebellion and chaos. When Columbus refused to follow the officer's orders, Columbus was arrested and sent back to Spain in shackles.

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7 'Facts' They Got Wrong in School About Christopher Columbus

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Advertisement Don't believe everything you learned in elementary school. Our rose-colored image of Christopher Columbus, daring discoverer of America, is largely based on Washington Irving's 1828 biography, "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus," much of which was invented. The real history of Columbus is far more complicated, controversial - and interesting.

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False Information: Instances of presenting scientifically inaccurate information, such as outdated or debunked theories, can occur in elementary science education. This might include perpetuating misconceptions about topics like climate change, evolution, or basic scientific principles.

Real Facts: Science education should align with current scientific consensus. Misinformation in this context might arise from outdated textbooks, biased perspectives, or a lack of awareness among educators about advancements in scientific understanding.

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Effective science teaching requires creativity, imagination, and innovation. In light of concerns about American science literacy, scientists and educators have struggled to teach this discipline more effectively. Science Teaching Reconsidered provides undergraduate science educators with a path to understanding students, accommodating their individual differences, and helping them grasp the methods-and the wonder-of science.

What impact does teaching style have? How do I plan a course curriculum? How do I make lectures, classes, and laboratories more effective? How can I tell what students are thinking? Why don't they understand? This handbook provides productive approaches to these and other questions.

Written by scientists who are also educators, the handbook offers suggestions for having a greater impact in the classroom and provides resources for further research.

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Read "Science Teaching Reconsidered: A Handbook" at NAP.edu

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Read chapter Chapter 4: Misconceptions as Barriers to Understanding Science: Effective science teaching requires creativity, imagination, and innovation. ...

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COMMENTARY: How educators can fight misinformation to safeguard students, staff and families

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If educators teach students how to check out potential misinformation, they will pass on those tools in their community.

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Schoolkids Are Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies

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Although children are prime targets, educators cannot figure out how best to teach them to separate fact from fiction

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After Sam Wineburg, PhD, delivers his first lecture on online disinformation to his Stanford University undergrads, the initial response is disengagement-a general vibe, Wineburg said, of "What does this gray-haired guy have to teach me about the internet?"

Then Wineburg, an educational psychologist in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, asks the students to imagine they're trying to get help for a bullied sibling. He instructs them to type in a string of keywords into Google and click on one of the top results. There, they'll find a well-formatted page on bullying. There's a logo, a .org domain name, and an author with an MD. The students concur: The website looks like a legitimate place to figure out how to deal with bullying.

So Wineburg asks the students to open a new tab and tells them to Google the name of the organization that runs the page: the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). Now the top hits include the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has identified ACPeds as a fringe hate group. Wikipedia is up there, too, providing a dispassionate history: The organization was formed to oppose adoption of children by gay couples and promotes conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. Much of the page on bullying is devoted to insisting that schools should not run anti-bullying programs focused on "special characteristics" that might "tempt" adolescents to "experiment with atypical behaviors." But the information is formatted and footnoted to look trustworthy.

The exercise is a real-life introduction to the idea that everyone, not just the naive or unsavvy, is vulnerable to disinformation.

"Once a group of smart Stanford undergraduates sees how easily they are taken in, how easily they fall for this stuff, they suddenly perk up and realize they have something to learn," Wineburg said. "Nobody wants to be an easy mark."

Wineburg is one of many psychology instructors who explicitly teach their students how to identify misinformation and disinformation and explain the difference between the two. Misinformation is incorrect information spread innocently: The person creating it or sharing it believes it to be true. Disinformation is deliberately false information.

Both pose enormous problems online, and college students are not immune. "The ability to use a device fluently does not mean that you automatically have the sophistication to evaluate the information that the device spews forth," Wineburg said.

Equal vulnerability

Age doesn't seem to matter much when it comes to false information, according to some research, which finds that young and old alike are vulnerable to mis- and disinformation. One study by psychologists Jimmeka Guillory Wright, PhD, of Spelman College, and Lisa Geraci, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, found that both younger and older adults have an equally difficult time replacing digested fake news with corrected facts (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 17, 2010). Participants read a passage with false information that was later corrected. After the correction, both young and old participants could recite the corrected facts. However, all ages still clung to inferences they'd made using the original incorrect information.

Research led by Stanford History Education Group director Joel Breakstone, PhD, and coauthored by Wineburg found that in a diverse sample of 3,446 high school students from 14 states, most students struggled to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy information online (Educational Researcher, Vol. 50, No. 8, 2021). Only about 3% of students realized, for example, that a website purporting to deliver legitimate information about climate change was run by the fossil fuel industry. More than half believed a misleading video supposedly showing ballot stuffing in a U.S. election. (It was a video from Russia.) The researchers found that the students tended to use ineffective methods for deciding whether to trust an internet source: They put a great deal of trust in .org web addresses, for example, and took "About Us" pages at face value. Less than 10% cross-checked a source's credentials with a simple web search.

This wasn't surprising, Wineburg said. Schools don't generally teach students how to conduct fact checks, despite the fact that teens average 7 to 8 hours a day online ( Common Sense Media, 2019). "Why would we expect young people to know how to do something that they weren't taught to do?" he said.

Fortunately, this sort of instruction melds nicely with the psychology curricula, from Psychology 101 to research methods courses to specialized seminars on cognition and reasoning. "It all comes back to what we know about cognitive biases, so you can connect it to psychology so easily," said Susan Nolan, PhD, a psychology professor at Seton Hall University and president of APA Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology).

Addressing misinformation

Many students come into psychology courses with preconceived notions about the subject, Nolan said, which makes it easy to work debunking into the curriculum from the get-go. Gregory Feist, PhD, a psychology professor at San Jose State University and coauthor of the textbook Psychology: Perspectives and Connections (McGraw Hill, 2022), says he and his coauthor built the idea of questioning preconceptions into the book's format by starting each chapter with a quiz on concepts that will come up later. In the developmental chapter, the quiz asks whether giving candy to kids makes them hyperactive. Many people believe sugared-up kids are bound to "bounce off the walls," even though decades of research finds this is untrue ( Wolraich, M. L., et al., JAMA, Vol. 274, No. 20, 1995). The text then debunks the myth and explains how researchers know it's false. Feist strives to bring a similar approach into class, focusing on teaching students how to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a study or argument and how to be aware of their own biases.

"The more I've been teaching, I realize it's really about teaching how to think rather than what to think," Feist said.

In his introductory psychology courses, New York University psychologist Jay Van Bavel, PhD, tries to instill the scientific mindset in his students, including tolerance of uncertainty. "I explain to them that science is a process" of getting closer and closer to truth, said Van Bavel, whose new book The Power of Us (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) covers echo chambers and cognitive biases. "That way, when they open The New York Times and see a scientific study they learned in Intro Psych got challenged or debunked, that doesn't mean that Intro Psych was baloney or the whole field of psychology was baloney."

Nolan keeps a running list of psychology-related myths and misinformation related to the subjects she teaches to bring to class. Presenting real-world examples is a common technique among instructors who teach about misinformation and disinformation. Feist asks his students to find a piece of disinformation and write a paper on how they know not to trust it. Lisa Fazio, PhD, of Vanderbilt University, asks students to post examples of misinformation and disinformation in a class Slack channel. At Spelman, Wright has her students track their media consumption throughout the day and assigns them a written reflection on where they get their news, what they believe, and why.

A key lesson to impart is that no one is immune from believing misinformation, Wright said. She shares examples of falling for false information herself and emphasizes that it's okay to alter one's beliefs based on new information. "I like to normalize being wrong," she said.

While a great deal of disinformation and misinformation is political, instructors strive to present examples from across the political spectrum as well as from nonpolitical sources so as not to turn off students who might have strong political beliefs. "One of the challenging things is not being hyperpolitical about it," Feist said.

Evidence-based strategies

Faculty interested in weaving these lessons into their psychology courses don't need to build a curriculum in a vacuum. Discussions of the topic can be found on the public Facebook page of Div. 2, and instructors post sample syllabi on the Open Science Framework webpage. (Find Fazio's syllabus for her course on the science of misinformation online.)

The literature on effective debunking can also be part of a lecture on misinformation. (See " Controlling the Spread of Misinformation" in the March 2021 Monitor.) And some classroom curricula and interventions have been empirically tested. One promising method is teaching "lateral reading," or the process of leaving an original source and checking for background information about the source elsewhere. In a study of teaching lateral reading in college-level civics courses, educational psychology doctoral student Jessica Brodsky of the City University of New York and colleagues found that students initially rarely did this kind of fact-checking but that teaching the strategies as part of a curriculum increased students' lateral reading (Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Vol. 6, No. 23, 2021). Wineburg, Breakstone, and their colleagues have tested teaching lateral reading in asynchronous video courses and found that at pretest, only 3 of the 87 participants used lateral reading, while 67 of the 87 did so post-test (Misinformation Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021).

Another strategy is to gamify the learning. The online game "Bad News" challenges players to become "fake news tycoons" by using outraged social media posts and emotionally driven headlines to gain influence. The game humorously communicates the strategies that disinformers use with a series of badges players can earn as they build a fake news empire, including awards for impersonation, emotion, polarization, conspiracy, trolling, and discrediting opponents. Research led by University of Cambridge social psychologist Sander van der Linden, PhD, has found that playing "Bad News" helped participants improve at spotting fake news (Journal of Cognition, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2020). The effect of the game fades over time without further intervention but remains strong over a period of at least 3 months if participants are retested on spotting fake headlines (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2021). Similar games, including a pandemic-specific one called "Factitious 2020: Pandemic Edition," allow students to test their mettle on differentiating the truthful from the untrustworthy.

As creators of disinformation become increasingly savvy and video- and image-manipulation tech improves, the challenge of creating skeptics who aren't nihilists, as Wright puts it, may become ever larger. More work will be needed on how best to combat sophisticated misinformation both within the education system and outside of it. But as medical misinformation worsens a deadly pandemic and political misinformation destabilizes democracies, psychologists say the classroom is a good place to fight back. "Tackling misinformation is not something we can fix all at once," Wright said, "but hopefully by increasing awareness we can start to help our students become more aware of their own bias and help them to be able to identify misinformation when they encounter it."

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After Sam Wineburg, PhD, delivers his first lecture on online disinformation to his Stanford University undergrads, the initial response is disengagement-a general vibe, Wineburg said, of "What does this gray-haired guy have to teach me about the internet?"

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Why students believe false information about Columbus/Science?

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Why students believe false information about Columbus/Science?

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Students may believe false information about Columbus and Revisionist Science due to outdated curricula, biased educational materials, and a lack of exposure to diverse perspectives. Additionally, reliance on traditional narratives and insufficient critical thinking skills may contribute to the acceptance of misinformation in these subjects.

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MISS AVERY SADLER

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BE AWARE OF MISINFORMATION AS TEACHERS TOO!!

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BE AWARE OF MISINFORMATION AS TEACHERS TOO!!