February 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 39to continue to explore,” says co-author Seth Ashley, an
associate professor of journalism and media studies
at Boise State University.
While Ashley’s results are encouraging, some ex -
perts worry that a focus only on evaluating Web sites
and news articles is too narrow. “News literacy in a lot
of ways focuses on credibility and whether we know
something is true or not, and that’s a really important
question, but that is one question,” says Michelle Ciulla
Lipkin, executive director of the National Association
for Media Literacy Education. “Once we figure out if
it’s false or true, what is the other assessment and the
other analyzing we need to do?” Determining credibil-
ity of the information is just the first step, she argues.
Students should also 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 informa-
tion is getting to the news consumer.
Pressing students to be skeptical about all informa-
tion also may have unexpected downsides. “We think
that some approaches to media literacy not only don’t
work but might actually backfire by increasing stu-
dents’ cynicism or exacerbating misunderstandings
about the way news media work,” says Peter Adams,
senior vice president of education at the News Liter-
acy Project. Students may begin to “read all kinds of
nefarious motives into everything.” Adams’s concern
was amplified by danah boyd, a technology scholar at
Microsoft Research and founder and president of the
Data & Society research institute, in a 2018 talk at the
South by Southwest media conference. Boyd argued
that although it is good to ask students to challenge
their assumptions, “the hole that opens up, that invites
people to look for new explanations, that hole can be
filled in deeply problematic ways.” Jordan Russell, a
high school social studies teacher in Bryan, Tex., agrees.
“It’s very easy for students to go from healthy critical
thinking to unhealthy skepticism” and the idea that
everyone is lying all the time, he says.
To avoid these potential problems, Ashley advo-
cates for broad approaches that help students develop
mindsets in which they become comfortable with
uncertainty. According to educational psychologist
William Perry of Harvard University, students go
through various stages of learning. First children are
black-and-white thinkers—they think there are right
answers and wrong answers. Then they develop into
relativists, realizing that knowledge can be contextual.
This stage can be dangerous, however. It is the one
where, as Russell notes, people can come to believe
there is no truth. Ashley adds that when students think
everything is a lie, they also think there is no point in
engaging with difficult topics.
With news literacy education, the goal is to get stu-
dents to the next level, “to that place where you can
start to see and appreciate the fact that the world is
messy, and that’s okay,” Ashley says. “You have these
fundamental approaches to gathering knowledge that
you can accept, but you still value uncertainty, and you
value ongoing debates about how the world works.”
Instead of driving students to apathy, the goal is to
steer them toward awareness and engagement.schools still hAve a long way to go before they get
there, though. One big challenge is how to expand
these programs so they reach everyone, especially
kids in lower-income school districts, who are much
less likely to receive any news literacy instruction at
all. And teachers already have so much material they
have to impart—can they squeeze in more, especially
if what they have to add is nuanced and complex?
“[We] desperately need professional development and
training and support for educators because they’re
not experts in the field,” Adams says. “And it’s the
most complex and fraught and largest information
landscape in human history.”In 2019 Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota intro-
duced the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act
into the U.S. Senate, which, if passed, would authorize
$20 million to create a grant program at the Depart-
ment of Education to help states develop and fund
media literacy education initiatives in K–12 schools.
More investment in this kind of education is critical if
America’s young people are going to learn how to nav-
igate this new and constantly evolving media land-
scape with their wits about them. And more research
is necessary to understand how to get them there. At
the Center for News Literacy, Schneider plans to con-
duct 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.
But many more studies will be needed for research-
ers to reach a comprehensive understanding of what
works and what doesn’t over the long term. Education
scholars need to take “an ambitious, big step forward,”
Schneider says. “What we’re facing are transforma-
tional changes in the way we receive, process and share
information. We’re in the middle of the most profound
revolution in 500 years.”FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Inside the Echo Chamber. Walter Quattrociocchi; April 2017.
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa“Some approaches to media
literacy not only don’t work
but might actually backfire
by increasing students’ cynicism.”
—Peter Adams News Literacy Project