Both Facts and Feelings: Emotion and News Literacy

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for addressing emotional responses to news with students, including both mindfulness techniques and psychological research on thinking processes

News Literacy in Argentina; Commitment to Democracy

The main challenge for a News Literacy program in Latin America is to reinforce democracy. After many years of strong military dictatorships, media literacy in this region should develop and strengthen students´ democratic culture and citizenship education. The other essential goal for News Literacy in Latin America is to break the social and cultural gaps –including critical reading skills- that exist between young people from privileged families and the ones who come from the poorest economic groups. The first step is to enact News Literacy as a public policy. There have always been teachers who taught students how to critically read media messages. When News Literacy becomes a public policy, however, the goal is to move beyond individual initiatives and turn these isolated efforts into state policy. The News Literacy Program in Argentina is a public policy run by the National State. Special initiatives and teacher training are essential for the development of the program. This paper will describe these initiatives and the ways they improve news literacy among students, by reinforcing democratic values and narrowing culture gaps

Rethinking the Future of News Literacy Education: Results from a Mixed Methods Study

In an era where most people rely on social media for their news and claims of fake news are rampant, news literacy is seen as increasingly important. In recent years, there has been a surge in initiatives to enhance news literacy among news consumers. However, our understanding of the effectiveness of these initiatives is limited. This study presents the findings from a mixed methods examination of the effectiveness of an online, asynchronous news literacy program offered to adults across the United States. While quantitative findings show that the program made little difference in participants’ already high levels of news literacy, the qualitative findings reveal that participating in the program provided people with a more nuanced, reflective, and less normative understanding of the news. Findings also point to the affective nature of news consumers’ interaction with news content, and a need to rethink news literacy education and assessment from a more learner-centered perspective

Teaching News Literacy in the Age Of New Media: Why Secondary School Students Should Be Taught to Judge the Credibility of the News They Consume

This paper involves two of the oldest institutions in America -- schools and the press -- and the preparation of informed citizens in the age of new media. I examine the manner and ways in which news literacy, the use of critical thinking skills to judge the reliability of news reports and news sources, is taught to secondary school students in the United States. It is axiomatic that a vigorous and independent press is critical to our democracy. Yet news literacy has not historically been included in the public school curriculum and continues to be widely absent, despite states vowing through their educational standards to graduate media literate students. News literacy is of increasing significance as the media sources from which citizens can obtain news and public affairs information continue to expand, and as people increasingly report being overwhelmed by the amount of information available online. Individual teachers, college faculty and a range of organizations run by media professionals have championed news literacy in recent years. In the following paper, I highlight these efforts to integrate news literacy lessons in the classroom, as well as the institutional barriers to broadening studentsΓÇÖ access to news literacy instruction

Examining the relationship between dispositional news literacy and discernment of real and misleading news:Cross-national evidence

The importance of news literacy to attenuate belief in and spread of misinformation has been emphasized by scholars and educators in recent years. This research note presents the first cross-national evidence demonstrating how dispositional news literacy (NL) is related to individuals’ discernment of true and false news on social media. Respondents in the United States (N = 205), United Kingdom (N = 205), and Hong Kong (N = 222) saw 10 true and 10 false social media posts in random order in their native languages and rated the accuracy of the posts. Regression analyses showed that higher news literacy was related to better discernment of news veracity in all three samples, though the pattern of discernment differed. Our findings demonstrate the utility of a holistic measure of news literacy that can be applied to comparative contexts. Moreover, they show the normative benefits of dispositional news literacy that could promote better news accuracy discernment in different societies around the world.</p

News Literacy and Democracy

News Literacy and Democracy invites readers to go beyond surface-level fact checking and to examine the structures, institutions, practices, and routines that comprise news media systems. This introductory text underscores the importance of news literacy to democratic life and advances an argument that critical contexts regarding news media structures and institutions should be central to news literacy education. Under the larger umbrella of media literacy, a critical approach to news literacy seeks to examine the mediated construction of the social world and the processes and influences that allow some news messages to spread while others get left out. Drawing on research from a range of disciplines, including media studies, political economy, and social psychology, this book aims to inform and empower the citizens who rely on news media so they may more fully participate in democratic and civic life. The book is an essential read for undergraduate students of journalism and news literacy and will be of interest to scholars teaching and studying media literacy, political economy, media sociology, and political psychology

The Usefulness of a News Media Literacy Measure in Evaluating a News Literacy Curriculum

The question “What is news literacy?” has been asked and answered in a number of ways, as scholars, teachers, librarians and journalists have sought to address the confusion resulting from the increasingly crowded digital information sphere. Concerns center on how the difficulty people face in differentiating reliable, credible information from unverified and biased information threatens their ability to participate in democratic life. Approaches to training and curriculum aimed at minimizing that difficulty have included standalone courses, modules in existing courses, after-school programs, and online exercises aimed at a variety of populations, from K-12 to college students to adults. Given this wide range of settings and populations, it is perhaps not surprising that the content of news literacy instruction also has ranged widely. A series of articles in the Columbia Journalism Review covering the 2014 National News Literacy Summit (the coverage and the summit were sponsored by the McCormick Foundation) makes clear that beyond shared civic goals, there remains a lot of diversity and, even, disagreement about what news literacy is and what efforts to enhance it should include (e.g. Jolly, September 4, 2014; Fry, 2015; Hobbs, 2010b). The lack of a common understanding has hindered efforts to assess the effectiveness of different approaches to news literacy instruction and to examine the relationship between news literacy and achievement of those shared civic goals. A newly developed and validated measure of news media literacy may offer a way to help fill this gap

News literacy and fake news curriculum: School librarians’ perceptions of pedagogical practices

The high profile of fake news reveals underlying trends in the production and consumption of news. While news literacy is a lifelong skill, the logical time to start teaching such literacy is in K-12 educational settings, so that all people have the opportunity to learn and practice news literacy. School librarians can play a critical role in helping students gain news literacy competence. This study investigated the needs for K-12 students to be news literate and their current level of skills as perceived by in-service teachers and school librarians in California. Respondents thought that their students were most competent at distinguishing advertisements and least proficient at discerning the trustworthiness of photographs. Concurrently, news literacy was seldom integrated systematically into the curriculum. The findings supported the need for developing news media literacy curriculum, including visual and media literacy, that could be implemented by K-12 teachers and school librarians

LAMBOOZLED!: The design and development of a game-based approach to news literacy education

Given the need for innovative, engaging, and youth-centered approaches to media literacy, as well as the potential of active pedagogies to facilitate youth civic education and efficacy, games emerge as a particularly promising and under-utilized avenue for news literacy education. Our research asks, how might we use game-based learning to tackle fake news and stimulate news literacy among a youth audience? Here, we reflect on the process of designing LAMBOOZLED!, a news literacy game for middle school and high school students, based on a multilevel game design framework that allowed us to articulate learning objectives, consider suitable mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, and integrate relevant instructional principles along multiple learning dimensions. Positioning this work at the nexus of game design and media literacy education, we discuss our key decision points and the larger stakes of adopting a game-based approach to news literacy education in the current political climate

The Specific Character of News Literacy Teaching in Russia and the Dynamics of the Media Literacy Level of Russian Students

This paper provides a short comparative analysis of known News Literacy teaching programs and methods in the structure of universities in various countries. It will focus on topics that are specific to Russian higher education and which are especially significant to the study of news literacy deficits in Russia. Thus, in the course of News Literacy teaching the National Research University Higher School of Economics puts a special emphasis on the consideration of news in historical retrospective and the role of news content in media spaces; the risks and challenges of “news” as a type of text message; discussions about whether news can be considered a “debauched value”; and methods of spotting fakes in verbal and visual communication. In addition, the interrelation and mutual influence of the News Literacy course with other educational subjects, particularly the journalistic deontological ethics course, is discerned. Teachers also compare the students’ media literacy level before and after studying of News Literacy. This report addresses whether it is possible to identify significant factors which influence informational and media literacy in general. This report is based on integrated data of the four-year (continuing) complex study of the media literacy level of students at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, conducted with Anna Kachkaeva and Anna Kolchina