Believe it or not?

Being news and information literate

RESEARCHERS at California’s Stanford’s Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year examining how students across the US evaluate online information. According to Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford and the lead author of a study released in November 2016 “Our digital natives may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped.” The survey of more than 7800 students revealed that many students for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from. Some 82 per cent of middleschoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labelled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website. Wineburg said it’s important that students learn to read like fact checkers. The study has created an impetus for more teachers to add media and news literacy lessons to their daily curriculum in an effort to reduce the growing influence of “fake news”, so-called “alternative facts” and “click bait”.