importance of critical thinking in fake news

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The Use of Critical Thinking to Identify Fake News: A Systematic Literature Review

Paul machete.

Department of Informatics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0001 South Africa

Marita Turpin

With the large amount of news currently being published online, the ability to evaluate the credibility of online news has become essential. While there are many studies involving fake news and tools on how to detect it, there is a limited amount of work that focuses on the use of information literacy to assist people to critically access online information and news. Critical thinking, as a form of information literacy, provides a means to critically engage with online content, for example by looking for evidence to support claims and by evaluating the plausibility of arguments. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of knowledge on the use of critical thinking to identify fake news. A systematic literature review (SLR) has been performed to identify previous studies on evaluating the credibility of news, and in particular to see what has been done in terms of the use of critical thinking to evaluate online news. During the SLR’s sifting process, 22 relevant studies were identified. Although some of these studies referred to information literacy, only three explicitly dealt with critical thinking as a means to identify fake news. The studies on critical thinking noted critical thinking as an essential skill for identifying fake news. The recommendation of these studies was that information literacy be included in academic institutions, specifically to encourage critical thinking.

Introduction

The information age has brought a significant increase in available sources of information; this is in line with the unparalleled increase in internet availability and connection, in addition to the accessibility of technological devices [ 1 ]. People no longer rely on television and print media alone for obtaining news, but increasingly make use of social media and news apps. The variety of information sources that we have today has contributed to the spread of alternative facts [ 1 ]. With over 1.8 billion active users per month in 2016 [ 2 ], Facebook accounted for 20% of total traffic to reliable websites and up to 50% of all the traffic to fake news sites [ 3 ]. Twitter comes second to Facebook, with over 400 million active users per month [ 2 ]. Posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter spread rapidly due to how they attempt to grab the readers’ attention as quickly as possible, with little substantive information provided, and thus create a breeding ground for the dissemination of fake news [ 4 ].

While social media is a convenient way of accessing news and staying connected to friends and family, it is not easy to distinguish real news from fake news on social media [ 5 ]. Social media continues to contribute to the increasing distribution of user-generated information; this includes hoaxes, false claims, fabricated news and conspiracy theories, with primary sources being social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter [ 6 ]. This means that any person who is in possession of a device, which can connect to the internet, is potentially a consumer or distributor of fake news. While social media platforms and search engines do not encourage people to believe the information being circulated, they are complicit in people’s propensity to believe the information they come across on these platforms, without determining their validity [ 6 ]. The spread of fake news can cause a multitude of damages to the subject; varying from reputational damage of an individual, to having an effect on the perceived value of a company [ 7 ].

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of critical thinking methods to detect news stories that are untrue or otherwise help to develop a critical attitude to online news. This work was performed by means of a systematic literature review (SLR). The paper is presented as follows. The next section provides background information on fake news, its importance in the day-to-day lives of social media users and how information literacy and critical thinking can be used to identify fake news. Thereafter, the SLR research approach is discussed. Following this, the findings of the review are reported, first in terms of descriptive statistics and the in terms of a thematic analysis of the identified studies. The paper ends with the Conclusion and recommendations.

Background: Fake News, Information Literacy and Critical Thinking

This section discusses the history of fake news, the fake news that we know today and the role of information literacy can be used to help with the identification of fake news. It also provides a brief definition of critical thinking.

The History of Fake News

Although fake news has received increased attention recently, the term has been used by scholars for many years [ 4 ]. Fake news emerged from the tradition of yellow journalism of the 1890s, which can be described as a reliance on the familiar aspects of sensationalism—crime news, scandal and gossip, divorces and sex, and stress upon the reporting of disasters, sports sensationalism as well as possibly satirical news [ 5 ]. The emergence of online news in the early 2000s raised concerns, among them being that people who share similar ideologies may form “echo chambers” where they can filter out alternative ideas [ 2 ]. This emergence came about as news media transformed from one that was dominated by newspapers printed by authentic and trusted journalists to one where online news from an untrusted source is believed by many [ 5 ]. The term later grew to describe “satirical news shows”, “parody news shows” or “fake-news comedy shows” where a television show, or segment on a television show was dedicated to political satire [ 4 ]. Some of these include popular television shows such as The Daily Show (now with Trevor Noah), Saturday Night Live ’s “The Weekend Update” segment, and other similar shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert [ 4 ]. News stories in these shows were labelled “fake” not because of their content, but for parodying network news for the use of sarcasm, and using comedy as a tool to engage real public issues [ 4 ]. The term “Fake News” further became prominent during the course of the 2016 US presidential elections, as members of the opposing parties would post incorrect news headlines in order to sway the decision of voters [ 6 ].

Fake News Today

The term fake news has a more literal meaning today [ 4 ]. The Macquarie Dictionary named fake news the word of the year for 2016 [ 8 ]. In this dictionary, fake news is described it as a word that captures a fascinating evolution in the creation of deceiving content, also allowing people to believe what they see fit. There are many definitions for the phrase, however, a concise description of the term can be found in Paskin [ 4 ] who states that certain news articles originating from either social media or mainstream (online or offline) platforms, that are not factual, but are presented as such and are not satirical, are considered fake news. In some instances, editorials, reports, and exposés may be knowingly disseminating information with intent to deceive for the purposes of monetary or political benefit [ 4 ].

A distinction amongst three types of fake news can be made on a conceptual level, namely: serious fabrications, hoaxes and satire [ 3 ]. Serious fabrications are explained as news items written on false information, including celebrity gossip. Hoaxes refer to false information provided via social media, aiming to be syndicated by traditional news platforms. Lastly, satire refers to the use of humour in the news to imitate real news, but through irony and absurdity. Some examples of famous satirical news platforms in circulation in the modern day are The Onion and The Beaverton , when contrasted with real news publishers such as The New York Times [ 3 ].

Although there are many studies involving fake news and tools on how to detect it, there is a limited amount of academic work that focuses on the need to encourage information literacy so that people are able to critically access the information they have been presented, in order to make better informed decisions [ 9 ].

Stein-Smith [ 5 ] urges that information/media literacy has become a more critical skill since the appearance of the notion of fake news has become public conversation. Information literacy is no longer a nice-to-have proficiency but a requirement for interpreting news headlines and participation in public discussions. It is essential for academic institutions of higher learning to present information literacy courses that will empower students and staff members with the prerequisite tools to identify, select, understand and use trustworthy information [ 1 ]. Outside of its academic uses, information literacy is also a lifelong skill with multiple applications in everyday life [ 5 ]. The choices people make in their lives, and opinions they form need to be informed by the appropriate interpretation of correct, opportune, and significant information [ 5 ].

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking covers a broad range of skills that includes the following: verbal reasoning skills; argument analysis; thinking as hypothesis testing; dealing with likelihood and uncertainties; and decision making and problem solving skills [ 10 ]. For the purpose of this study, where we are concerned with the evaluation of the credibility of online news, the following definition will be used: critical thinking is “the ability to analyse and evaluate arguments according to their soundness and credibility, respond to arguments and reach conclusions through deduction from given information” [ 11 ]. In this study, we want to investigate how the skills mentioned by [ 11 ] can be used as part of information literacy, to better identify fake news.

The next section presents the research approach that was followed to perform the SLR.

Research Method

This section addresses the research question, the search terms that were applied to a database in relation to the research question, as well as the search criteria used on the search results. The following research question was addressed in this SLR:

• What is the role of critical thinking in identifying fake news, according to previous studies?

The research question was identified in accordance to the research topic. The intention of the research question is to determine if the identified studies in this review provide insights into the use of critical thinking to evaluate the credibility of online news and in particular to identify fake news.

Delimitations.

In the construction of this SLR, the following definitions of fake news and other related terms have been excluded, following the suggestion of [ 2 ]:

• Unintentional reporting mistakes;
• Rumours that do not originate from a particular news article;
• Conspiracy theories;
• Satire that is unlikely to be misconstrued as factual;
• False statements by politicians; and
• Reports that are slanted or misleading, but not outright false.

Search Terms.

The database tool used to extract sources to conduct the SLR was Google Scholar ( https://scholar.google.com ). The process for extracting the sources involved executing the search string on Google Scholar and the retrieval of the articles and their meta-data into a tool called Mendeley, which was used for reference management.

The search string used to retrieve the sources was defined below:

(“critical think*” OR “critically (NEAR/2) reason*” OR “critical (NEAR/2) thought*” OR “critical (NEAR/2) judge*” AND “fake news” AND (identify* OR analyse* OR find* OR describe* OR review).

To construct the search criteria, the following factors have been taken into consideration: the research topic guided the search string, as the key words were used to create the base search criteria. The second step was to construct the search string according to the search engine requirements on Google Scholar.

Selection Criteria.

The selection criteria outlined the rules applied in the SLR to identify sources, narrow down the search criteria and focus the study on a specific topic. The inclusion and exclusion criteria are outlined in Table  1 to show which filters were applied to remove irrelevant sources.

Table 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria for paper selection

Source Selection.

The search criteria were applied on the online database and 91 papers were retrieved. The criteria in Table  1 were used on the search results in order to narrow down the results to appropriate papers only.

PRISMA Flowchart.

The selection criteria included four stages of filtering and this is depicted in Fig.  1 . In then Identification stage, the 91 search results from Google Scholar were returned and 3 sources were derived from the sources already identified from the search results, making a total of 94 available sources. In the screening stage, no duplicates were identified. After a thorough screening of the search results, which included looking at the availability of the article (free to use), 39 in total records were available – to which 55 articles were excluded. Of the 39 articles, nine were excluded based on their titles and abstract being irrelevant to the topic in the eligibility stage. A final list of 22 articles was included as part of this SLR. As preparation for the data analysis, a data extraction table was made that classified each article according to the following: article author; article title; theme (a short summary of the article); year; country; and type of publication. The data extraction table assisted in the analysis of findings as presented in the next section.

PRISMA flowchart

Analysis of Findings

Descriptive statistics.

Due to the limited number of relevant studies, the information search did not have a specified start date. Articles were included up to 31 August 2019. The majority of the papers found were published in 2017 (8 papers) and 2018 (9 papers). This is in line with the term “fake news” being announced the word of the year in the 2016 [ 8 ].

The selected papers were classified into themes. Figure  2 is a Venn diagram that represents the overlap of articles by themes across the review. Articles that fall under the “fake news” theme had the highest number of occurrences, with 11 in total. Three articles focused mainly on “Critical Thinking”, and “Information Literacy” was the main focus of four articles. Two articles combined all three topics of critical thinking, information literacy, and fake news.

Venn diagram depicting the overlap of articles by main focus

An analysis of the number of articles published per country indicate that the US had a dominating amount of articles published on this topic, a total of 17 articles - this represents 74% of the selected articles in this review. The remaining countries where articles were published are Australia, Germany, Ireland, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden - with each having one article published.

In terms of publication type, 15 of the articles were journal articles, four were reports, one was a thesis, one was a magazine article and one, a web page.

Discussion of Themes

The following emerged from a thematic analysis of the articles.

Fake News and Accountability.

With the influence that social media has on the drive of fake news [ 2 ], who then becomes responsible for the dissemination and intake of fake news by the general population? The immediate assumption is that in the digital age, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be able to curate information, or do some form of fact-checking when posts are uploaded onto their platforms [ 12 ], but that leans closely to infringing on freedom of speech. While different authors agree that there need to be measures in place for the minimisation of fake news being spread [ 12 , 13 ], where that accountability lies differs between the authors. Metaxas and Mustafaraj [ 13 ] aimed to develop algorithms or plug-ins that can assist in trust and postulated that consumers should be able to identify misinformation, thus making an informed decision on whether to share that information or not. Lazer et al. [ 12 ] on the other hand, believe the onus should be on the platform owners to put restrictions on the kind of data distributed. Considering that the work by Metaxas and Mustafaraj [ 13 ] was done seven years ago, one can conclude that the use of fact-checking algorithms/plug-ins has not been successful in curbing the propulsion of fake news.

Fake News and Student Research.

There were a total of four articles that had a focus on student research in relation to fake news. Harris, Paskin and Stein-Smith [ 4 , 5 , 14 ] all agree that students do not have the ability to discern between real and fake news. A Stanford History Education Group study reveals that students are not geared up for distinguishing real from fake news [ 4 ]. Most students are able to perform a simple Google search for information; however, they are unable to identify the author of an online source, or if the information is misleading [ 14 ]. Furthermore, students are not aware of the benefits of learning information literacy in school in equipping them with the skills required to accurately identify fake news [ 5 ]. At the Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickson University, librarians have undertaken the role of providing training on information literacy skills for identifying fake news [ 5 ].

Fake News and Social Media.

A number of authors [ 6 , 15 ] are in agreement that social media, the leading source of news, is the biggest driving force for fake news. It provides substantial advantage to broadcast manipulated information. It is an open platform of unfiltered editors and open to contributions from all. According to Nielsen and Graves as well as Janetzko, [ 6 , 15 ], people are unable to identify fake news correctly. They are likely to associate fake news with low quality journalism than false information designed to mislead. Two articles, [ 15 ] and [ 6 ] discussed the role of critical thinking when interacting on social media. Social media presents information to us that has been filtered according to what we already consume, thereby making it a challenge for consumers to think critically. The study by Nielsen and Graves [ 6 ] confirm that students’ failure to verify incorrect online sources requires urgent attention as this could indicate that students are a simple target for presenting manipulated information.

Fake News That Drive Politics.

Two studies mention the effect of social and the spread of fake news, and how it may have propelled Donald Trump to win the US election in 2016 [ 2 , 16 ]. Also, [ 8 ] and [ 2 ] mention how a story on the Pope supporting Trump in his presidential campaign, was widely shared (more than a million times) on Facebook in 2016. These articles also point out how in the information age, fact-checking has become relatively easy, but people are more likely to trust their intuition on news stories they consume, rather than checking the reliability of a story. The use of paid trolls and Russian bots to populate social media feeds with misinformation in an effort to swing the US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour, is highlighted [ 16 ]. The creation of fake news, with the use of alarmist headlines (“click bait”), generates huge traffic into the original websites, which drives up advertising revenue [ 2 ]. This means content creators are compelled to create fake news, to drive ad revenue on their websites - even though they may not be believe in the fake news themselves [ 2 ].

Information Literacy.

Information literacy is when a person has access to information, and thus can process the parts they need, and create ways in which to best use the information [ 1 ]. Teaching students the importance of information literacy skills is key, not only for identifying fake news but also for navigating life aspects that require managing and scrutinising information, as discussed by [ 1 , 17 ], and [ 9 ]. Courtney [ 17 ] highlights how journalism students, above students from other disciplines, may need to have some form of information literacy incorporated into their syllabi to increase their awareness of fake news stories, creating a narrative of being objective and reliable news creators. Courtney assessed different universities that teach journalism and media-related studies, and established that students generally lack awareness on how useful library services are in offering services related to information literacy. Courtney [ 17 ] and Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] discuss how the use of library resources should be normalised to students. With millennials and generation Z having social media as their first point of contact, Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] urges universities, colleges and other academic research institutes to promote the use of more library resources than those from the internet, to encourage students to lean on reliable sources. Overall, this may prove difficult, therefore Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] proposes that by teaching information literacy skills and critical thinking, students can use these skills to apply in any situation or information source.

Referred to as “truth decay”, people have reached a point where they no longer need to agree with facts [ 18 ]. Due to political polarisation, the general public hold the opinion of being part of an oppressed group of people, and therefore will believe a political leader who appeals to that narrative [ 18 ]. There needs to be tangible action put into driving civil engagement, to encourage people to think critically, analyse information and not believe everything they read.

Critical Thinking.

Only three of the articles had critical thinking as a main theme. Bronstein et al. [ 19 ] discuss how certain dogmatic and religious beliefs create a tendency in individuals to belief any information given, without them having a need to interrogate the information further and then deciding ion its veracity. The article further elaborates how these individuals are also more likely to engage in conspiracy theories, and tend to rationalise absurd events. Bronstein et al.’s [ 19 ] study conclude that dogmatism and religious fundamentalism highly correlate with a belief in fake news. Their study [ 19 ] suggests the use of interventions that aim to increase open-minded thinking, and also increase analytical thinking as a way to help religious, curb belief in fake news. Howlett [ 20 ] describes critical thinking as evidence-based practice, which is taking the theories of the skills and concepts of critical thinking and converting those for use in everyday applications. Jackson [ 21 ] explains how the internet purposely prides itself in being a platform for “unreviewed content”, due to the idea that people may not see said content again, therefore it needs to be attention-grabbing for this moment, and not necessarily accurate. Jackson [ 21 ] expands that social media affected critical thinking in how it changed the view on published information, what is now seen as old forms of information media. This then presents a challenge to critical thinking in that a large portion of information found on the internet is not only unreliable, it may also be false. Jackson [ 21 ] posits that one of the biggest dangers to critical thinking may be that people have a sense of perceived power for being able to find the others they seek with a simple web search. People are no longer interested in evaluation the credibility of the information they receive and share, and thus leading to the propagation of fake news [ 21 ].

Discussion of Findings

The aggregated data in this review has provided insight into how fake news is perceived, the level of attention it is receiving and the shortcomings of people when identifying fake news. Since the increase in awareness of fake news in 2016, there has been an increase in academic focus on the subject, with most of the articles published between 2017 and 2018. Fifty percent of the articles released focused on the subject of fake news, with 18% reflecting on information literacy, and only 13% on critical thinking.

The thematic discussion grouped and synthesised the articles in this review according to the main themes of fake news, information literacy and critical thinking. The Fake news and accountability discussion raised the question of who becomes accountable for the spreading of fake news between social media and the user. The articles presented a conclusion that fact-checking algorithms are not successful in reducing the dissemination of fake news. The discussion also included a focus on fake news and student research , whereby a Stanford History Education Group study revealed that students are not well educated in thinking critically and identifying real from fake news [ 4 ]. The Fake news and social media discussion provided insight on social media is the leading source of news as well as a contributor to fake news. It provides a challenge for consumers who are not able to think critically about online news, or have basic information literacy skills that can aid in identifying fake news. Fake news that drive politics highlighted fake news’ role in politics, particularly the 2016 US presidential elections and the influence it had on the voters [ 22 ].

Information literacy related publications highlighted the need for educating the public on being able to identify fake news, as well as the benefits of having information literacy as a life skill [ 1 , 9 , 17 ]. It was shown that students are often misinformed about the potential benefits of library services. The authors suggested that university libraries should become more recognised and involved as role-players in providing and assisting with information literacy skills.

The articles that focused on critical thinking pointed out two areas where a lack of critical thinking prevented readers from discerning between accurate and false information. In the one case, it was shown that people’s confidence in their ability to find information online gave made them overly confident about the accuracy of that information [ 21 ]. In the other case, it was shown that dogmatism and religious fundamentalism, which led people to believe certain fake news, were associated with a lack of critical thinking and a questioning mind-set [ 21 ].

The articles that focused on information literacy and critical thinking were in agreement on the value of promoting and teaching these skills, in particular to the university students who were often the subjects of the studies performed.

This review identified 22 articles that were synthesised and used as evidence to determine the role of critical thinking in identifying fake news. The articles were classified according to year of publication, country of publication, type of publication and theme. Based on the descriptive statistics, fake news has been a growing trend in recent years, predominantly in the US since the presidential election in 2016. The research presented in most of the articles was aimed at the assessment of students’ ability to identify fake news. The various studies were consistent in their findings of research subjects’ lack of ability to distinguish between true and fake news.

Information literacy emerged as a new theme from the studies, with Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] advising academic institutions to teach information literacy and encourage students to think critically when accessing online news. The potential role of university libraries to assist in not only teaching information literacy, but also assisting student to evaluate the credibility of online information, was highlighted. The three articles that explicitly dealt with critical thinking, all found critical thinking to be lacking among their research subjects. They further indicated how this lack of critical thinking could be linked to people’s inability to identify fake news.

This review has pointed out people’s general inability to identify fake news. It highlighted the importance of information literacy as well as critical thinking, as essential skills to evaluate the credibility of online information.

The limitations in this review include the use of students as the main participants in most of the research - this would indicate a need to shift the academic focus towards having the general public as participants. This is imperative because anyone who possesses a mobile device is potentially a contributor or distributor of fake news.

For future research, it is suggested that the value of the formal teaching of information literacy at universities be further investigated, as a means to assist students in assessing the credibility of online news. Given the very limited number of studies on the role of critical thinking to identify fake news, this is also an important area for further research.

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Since the 2016 US presidential election, the phrase ‘ fake news ’ has become standard currency. But what does the term actually mean, and how can you distinguish fake from ‘real’ news?

The bad news is that ‘fake news’ is often very believable, and it is extremely easy to get caught out.

This page explains how you can apply critical thinking techniques to news stories to reduce the chances of believing fake news, or at least starting to understand that ‘not everything you read is true’.

What is ‘ Fake News ’?

‘Fake news’ is news stories that are either completely untrue, or do not contain all the truth, with a view to deliberately misleading readers.

Fake news became prominent during the US election, with supporters of both sides tweeting false information in the hope of influencing voters. But it is nothing new.

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

In May 1897, Mark Twain, the American author, was in London. Rumours reached the US that he was very ill and, later, that he had died. In a letter to Frank Marshall White, a journalist who inquired after his health as a result, Mark Twain suggested that the rumours had started because his cousin, who shared his surname, had been ill a few weeks before. He noted dryly to White,

“The report of my death was an exaggeration”.

It had, nonetheless, been widely reported in the US, with one newspaper even printing an obituary.

Fake news is not:

Articles on satirical or humorous websites, or related publications, that make a comment on the news by satirising them, because this is intended to inform and amuse, not misinform;

Anything obvious that ‘everyone already knows’ (often described using the caption ‘that’s not news’; or

An article whose content you disagree with.

The deliberate intention of fake news to mislead is crucial.

Why is Fake News a Problem?

If fake news has been around for so long, why is it suddenly a problem?

The answer is that social media means that credible fake news stories can spread very quickly.

In the worst cases, they can have major effects. There are suggestions that fake news influenced the 2016 US election. In another case, a gunman opened fire at a pizzeria that had been falsely but widely reported as being the centre of a paedophile ring involving prominent politicians. In less critical cases, fake news reports can result in distress or reputational damage for the people or organisations mentioned in the articles.

It is, therefore, important to be alert to the potential for reports to be fake, and to ensure that you are not party to their spread.

Spotting fake news

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to spot false news.

Sometimes, a story may be obviously false – for example, it may contain typos or spelling mistakes, or formatting errors. Like phishing emails, however, some fake news stories are a lot more subtle than that.

Facebook famously issued a guide to spotting fake news in May 2017. Its advice ranges from the obvious to the much less intuitive. Useful tips include:

Investigate the source

Be wary of stories written by unknown sources, and check their website for more information. Stories from reliable news sources, such as national newspapers or broadcasters, are more likely to have been checked and verified. It is also worth looking at the URL, to make sure it is a genuine news organisation.

Look at the evidence on which the article bases its claims, and check whether they seem credible. If there are no sources given, or the source is an unknown ‘expert’ or ‘friend’ of someone concerned, be sceptical.

Check whether other, reliable news sources are carrying the story

Sometimes, even otherwise reliable news sources get carried away and forget to do all the necessary checks. But one very good check is to ask whether other reliable sources are also carrying the story. If yes, it is likely to be correct. If not, you should at least be doubtful.

Facebook’s advice boils down to reading news stories critically.

That does not mean looking for their flaws, or criticising them, although this can be part of critical reading and thinking. Instead, it means applying logic and reason to your thinking and reading, so that you make a sensible judgement about what you are reading.

In practice, this means being alert to why the article has been written, and what the author wants you to feel, think or even do as a result of reading it. Even accurate stories may have been written in a way that is designed to steer you towards a particular point of view or action.

For more about this see our pages on Critical Thinking and Critical Reading .

A word about bias

It is worth remembering that everyone has their opinions, and therefore sources of potential bias in what they write. These may be conscious or unconscious. News organisations tend to have an organisational ‘view’ or political slant. For example, the UK’s Guardian is broadly left-wing, and most of the UK tabloids are right-wing in their views, and this affects both what they report and how they report it.

As a reader, you also have biases, both conscious and unconscious, and these affect the stories you choose to read, and the sources you use. It is therefore possible to self-select only stories that confirm your own view of the world, and social media is very good at helping with this.

To overcome this, it is important to use more than one source of information, and try to ensure that they have at least small differences in their political views.

A final thought

Fake news spreads so fast because we all like the idea of telling people something that they did not already know, something exclusive, and because we want to share our view of the world. It’s a bit like gossip.

But like false gossip, fake news can harm. Next time, before you click on ‘share’ or ‘retweet’, just take a moment to think about whether the story that you are spreading is likely to be true or not. Even if you think it is true, consider the possible effect of spreading it. Is it going to hurt anyone if it turns out to be false?

If so, don’t go there, think before you share.

Continue to: Understanding and Addressing Conspiracy Theories Critical Thinking Skills

See also: Making Sense of Financial News Understanding and Interpreting Online Product Reviews Critical Analysis

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Experts shared advice on how to teach students to analyze information during an S LJ /ISTE webcast on critical thinking in the age of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation.

In today’s complex media environment, students must learn how to identify the source of information, verify it, and analyze how it was designed to make them feel, according to news and information literacy experts.

SLJ and ISTE recently hosted a webcast, Critical Thinking in the Age of Fake News , with panelists Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at the News Literacy Project, Renee DiResta, research manager at Stanford University Internet Observatory, and Jennifer LaGarde, an educator and the co-author of Fact vs. Fiction: Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Fake News. SLJ ’s editor, news and features, Sarah Bayliss moderated.

“One of the main issues is how do you think critically when there is such a myriad of sources,” DiRosa said. “It’s so hard to even know where your information is coming from.”

DiResta explained the differences between four important terms that are used in academia and research: fake news, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.

• Fake news is a term that used to refer to information that was demonstrably false. The term has fallen out of favor since it has become so politicized and is often used to dismiss news that someone just doesn’t like, DiResta said.
• Misinformation refers to information that is inadvertently wrong and not intended to misinform people.
• Disinformation refers to information or the distribution of information that is deliberately incorrect or deceptive and intended to spread a false message­­.
• Propaganda refers to information with an agenda. It is intended to persuade, and while it is not always false, it contains a lot of cheerleading or an unnecessarily positive spin.

There is a wide range of people now active in the creation and dissemination of information, DiResta said. Disinformation and propaganda are no longer produced only by state government or state media. Now it can also come from terrorist organizations, domestic ideologues, spammers, or people who are economically motivated.

Adams noted that the coronavirus pandemic and recent protests to “reopen” the country have sparked a lot of misinformation. For example, some people have spread false medical information and doctored photos to support conspiratorial claims, he said.

“It’s easy for people to believe that sharing this kind of information can’t hurt,” Adams said. “But it can give them a false confidence that they might not need to take the kinds of precautions that they otherwise would.”

Adams shared four key skills educators can teach students to help them combat misinformation.

• Lateral reading. Verifying information as you read it. This can be done by leaving the site and looking at other sites to make sure the original source is reliable and authentic.
• Critical observation. Using critical thinking to look more carefully at images and think about where those images were taken.
• Reverse image search. A digital investigative technique used to find the original source of photographs. Google has specific tools for this, and other sites such as TinEye and Yandex , also help users with these searches.
• Geolocation. Verifying the location of online information. It involves using Google Street View and other sites to confirm the location of an image.

LaGarde said educators need to start making the connection between news and information literacy and social-emotional learning.

“We have to teach kids that they need to think about how the news and information makes them feel,” she said. “And we need to provide some strategies for navigating that emotional response.”

She also noted that many schools teach kids about news literacy on desktops and laptops, while most people, including students, now access information through their phones. She advised listeners to teach students how to parse information for credibility on phones.

LaGarde also stressed the importance of getting students to think about what motivates someone to create and share information, and she noted that many kids are already creating content on YouTube and Instagram.

“We can harness their interest in creating content to help them think about the choices that content creators make when creating information that is suspect or false,” LaGarde said. “We can help kids get inside the minds of people who create news and information.”

Melanie Kletter is an educator and freelance writer and editor.

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Fake News & Critical Thinking: Critical Thinking

• Critical Thinking
• Finding Real News

What is Critical Thinking?

Think critically about what you read, hear, see, and about how you absorb information. It's a good way to begin figuring out and interpreting fake news, alternative facts, post-truth, and misinformation.

Resources - Articles, Books, & Websites

• Critical Thinking: Where to Begin? from the Foundation for Critical Thinking
• Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach (article) Willingham, D. T. (2008). Critical thinking: why is it so hard to teach? Arts Education Policy Review, 109 (4), 21–29.
• Civic Online Reasoning (COR) A free curriculum developed by the Stanford History Education Group
• Center for News Literacy
• FakeOut Can you spot ‘fake news’? Have fun finding the facts with this social media-emulating game.

Figuring Out Images

With advanced image altering software, images can provide false or misleading information too. Google Reverse Image Search allows users to verify what websites used the image. When viewing images, ask yourself these questions:

• When was the picture taken?
• Where was the picture taken?
• Who took the picture?
• Look closely?
• Why are you seeing this now?

Analyzing News Sources

• Avoid websites that end in “lo” ex: Newslo. These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of satire or comedy).
• Watch out for websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources.
• Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event.
• Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.
• Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification.
• Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs).
• Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on  Snopes  or  Wikipedia  for more information about the source.
• Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources.
• If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
• If the website you’re reading encourages you to dox individuals (doxing is searching for and publishing private or identifying information about someone on the Internet, typically with malicious intent), it’s unlikely to be a legitimate source of news.
• It’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get a variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources not yet included in this list (although their practices at times may qualify them for addition), such as The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Fox News, vacillate between providing important, legitimate, problematic, and/or hyperbolic news coverage, requiring readers and viewers to verify and contextualize information with other sources.

[from M. Zimbar,  False, misleading, clickbait-y, and / or satirical "news" sources.  Retrieved from Pace University Library Research Guide .  Illustration by Jim Cooke .]

A Word About Search Engines

Search engine creators, like Google, are businesses whose purpose is to turn a profit, not help you find information. Using several different search engines when seeking information is good practice, don't become loyal to just one. In addition, consider using search engines that are uncensored and anonymous, such as, DuckDuckGo  or GIBIRU .

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• Last Updated: Apr 2, 2024 6:52 PM
• URL: https://libguides.su.edu/fake_news

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Original research article, “fake news” or real science critical thinking to assess information on covid-19.

• 1 Department of Applied Didactics, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Santiago de Compostela, Spain
• 2 IES Ramón Cabanillas, Xunta de Galicia, Cambados, Spain

Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students ( N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlines.

Introduction: Critical Thinking for Social Responsibility – An Urgent Need in the Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon that affects almost all spheres of our life, aside from its obvious direct impacts on human health and well-being. As mentioned by the UN Secretary General, in his call for solidarity, “We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations — one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives.” (19 March 2020, Guterres, 2020 ). COVID-19 has revealed the vulnerability of global systems’ abilities to protect the environment, health and economy, making it urgent to provide a responsible response that involves collaboration between diverse social actors. For science education the pandemic has raised new and unthinkable challenges ( Dillon and Avraamidou, 2020 ; Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig, 2021 ), which highlight the importance of critical thinking (CT) development in promoting responsible actions and responses to the coronavirus disease, which is the focus of this paper. Despite the general public’s respect of science and scientific advances, denial movements – such as the ones that reject the use of vaccines and advocate for alternative health therapies – are increasing during this period ( Dillon and Avraamidou, 2020 ). The rapid global spread of the coronavirus disease has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as the COVID-19 social media infodemic. The term infodemic refers to an overabundance of information (real or not) associated with a specific topic, whose growth can occur exponentially in a short period of time [ World Health Organization (WHO), 2020 ]. The case of the COVID-19 pandemic shows the crucial importance of socio-scientific instruction toward students’ development of critical thinking (CT) for citizenship.

Critical thinking is embedded within the framework of “21st century skills” and is considered one of the goals of education ( van Gelder, 2005 ). Despite its importance, there is not a clear consensus on how to better promote CT in science instruction, and teachers often find it unclear what CT means and requires from them in their teaching practice ( Vincent-Lacrin et al., 2019 ). CT is understood in this study as a set of skills and dispositions that enable students and people to take critical actions based on reasons and values, but also as independent thinking ( Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig, 2021 ). It is also considered as a dialogic practice that students can enact and thereby become predisposed to practice ( Kuhn, 2019 ). We consider that CT has two fundamental roles in SSI instruction: one role linked to the promotion of rational arguments, cognitive skills and dispositions; and the other related to the idea of critical action and social activism, which is consistent with the characterization of CT provided by Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig (2021) . Although research on SSIs has provided us with empirical evidence supporting the benefits of SSI instruction, particularly argumentation and students’ motivation toward learning science, there is still scarce knowledge on how CT is articulated in these contexts. One challenge with promoting CT, especially in SSIs, is linked to new forms of communication that generate a rapid increase of information and easy access to it ( Puig et al., 2020 ).

The study was developed in an unprecedented scenario, during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020), which forced the change of face-to-face teaching to virtual teaching, involving students in online activities that embraced the application of scientific notions related to COVID-19 and CT for assessing claims published in news headlines related to it. Previous studies have pointed out the benefits of virtual environments to foster CT among students, particularly asynchronous discussions that minimize social presence and favor all students expressing their own opinion ( Puig et al., 2020 ).

In this research, we aim to explore students’ ability to critically engage in the assessment of the credibility of COVID-19 claims during a moment in which fake news disseminated by social media was shared by the general public and disinformation on the virus was easier to access than real news.

Theoretical Framework

We will first discuss the crucial role of CT to address controversial issues and to fight against the rise of misinformation on COVID-19; and then turn attention to the role of argumentation in students’ development of CT in SSI instruction in epistemic education.

Critical Thinking on Socio-Scientific Instruction to Face the Rise of Disinformation

SSIs are compelling issues for the application of knowledge and processes contributing to the development of CT. They are multifaceted problems, as is the case of COVID-19, that involve informal reasoning and elements of critique where decisions present direct consequences to the well-being of human society and the environment ( Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig, 2021 ). People need to balance subject matter knowledge, personal values, and societal norms when making decisions on SSIs ( Aikenhead, 1985 ) but they also have to be critical of the discourses that shape their own beliefs and practices to act responsibly ( Bencze et al., 2020 ). According to Duschl (2020) , science education should involve the creation of a dialogic discourse among members of a class that focuses on the teaching and learning of “how did we come to know?” and “why do we accept that knowledge over alternatives?” Studies on SSIs during the last decades have pointed out students’ difficulties in building arguments and making critical choices based on evidence ( Evagorou et al., 2012 ). However, literature also indicates that students find SSIs motivational for learning and increase their community involvement ( Eastwood et al., 2012 ; Evagorou, 2020 ), thus they are appropriate contexts for CT development. While research on content knowledge and different modes of reasoning on SSIs is extensive, the practice of CT is understudied in science instruction. Of particular interest in science education are SSIs that involve health controversies, since they include some of the challenges posed by the post-truth era, as the health crisis produced by coronavirus shows. The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting most countries and territories around the world, which is why it is considered the greatest challenge that humankind has faced since the 2nd World War ( Chakraborty and Maity, 2020 ). Issues like COVID-19 that affect society in multiple ways require literate citizens who are capable of making critical decisions and taking actions based on reasons. As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to the virus. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful [ World Health Organization (WHO), 2020 ]. In the context of growing disinformation related to the COVID-19 outbreak, EU institutions have worked to raise awareness of the dangers of disinformation and promoted the use of authoritative sources ( European Council of the European Union, 2020 ). Educators and science educators have been increasingly concerned with what can be done in science instruction to face the spread of misinformation and denial of well-established claims; helping students to identify what is true can be a hard task ( Barzilai and Chinn, 2020 ). As these authors suggest, diverse factors may shape what people perceive as true, such as the socio-cultural context in which people live, their personal experiences and their own judgments, that could be biased. We concur with these authors and Feinstein and Waddington (2020) , who argue that science education should not focus on achieving the knowledge, but rather on gaining appropriate scientific knowledge and skills, which in our view involves CT development. Furthermore, according to Sperber et al. (2010) , there are factors that affect the acceptance or rejection of a piece of information. These factors have to do either with the source of the information – “who to believe” – or with its content – “what to believe.” The pursuit of truth when dealing with SSIs can be facilitated by the social practices used to develop knowledge ( Duschl, 2020 ), such as argumentation understood as the evaluation of claims based on evidence, which is part of CT development.

We consider CT and argumentation as overlapping competencies in their contexts of practice; for instance, when assessing claims on COVID-19, as in this study. According to Sperber et al. (2010) , we now have almost no filters on information, and this requires a much more vigilant, knowledgeable reader. As these authors point out, individuals need to become aware of their own cognitive biases and how to avoid being victims themselves. If we want students to learn how to critically evaluate the information and claims they will encounter in social media outside the classroom, we need to engage them in the practice of argumentation and CT. This raises the question of what type of information is easier or harder for students to assess, especially when they are directly affected by the problem. In this paper we aim to explore this issue by exploring students’ arguments while assessing diverse claims on COVID-19. We think that students’ arguments reflect their ability to apply CT in this context, although this does not mean that CT skills always produce a well-reasoned argument ( Halpern, 1998 ). Students should be encouraged to express their own thoughts in SSI instruction, but also to support their views reasonably ( Puig and Ageitos, 2021 ). Specifically, when they must assess the validity of information that affects not only them as individuals but also the whole society and environment. CT may equip citizens to discard fake news and to use appropriate criteria to evaluate information. This requires the design and implementation of specific CT tasks, as this study presents.

Argumentation to Enhance Critical Thinking Development in Epistemic Education on SSIs

While the concept of CT has a long tradition and educators agree on its importance, there is a lack of agreement on what this notion involves ( Thomas and Lok, 2015 ). CT has been used with a wide range of meanings in theoretical literature ( Facione, 1990 ; Ennis, 2018 ). In 1990, The American Philosophical Association convened an authoritative panel of forty-six noted experts on CT to produce a definitive account of the concept, which was published in the Delphi Report ( Facione, 1990 ). The Delphi definition provides a list of skills and dispositions that can be useful and guide CT instruction. However, as Davies and Barnett (2015) point out, this Delphi definition does not include the phenomenon of action. We concur with these authors that CT education should involve students in “CT for action,” since decision making – a way of deciding on a course of action – is based on judgments derived from argumentation using CT. Drawing from Halpern (1998) , we also think that CT requires awareness of one’s own knowledge. CT requires, for instance, insight into what one knows and the extent and importance of what one does not know in order to assess socio-scientific news and its implications ( Puig and Ageitos, 2021 ).

Critical thinking and argumentation share core elements like rationality and reflection ( Andrews, 2015 ). Some researchers suggest understanding CT as a dialogic practice ( Kuhn, 2019 ) has implications in CT instruction and development. Argumentation on SSIs, particularly on health controversies, is receiving increasing attention in science education in the post-truth era, as the coronavirus pandemic and denial movements related to its origin, prevention, and treatment show. Science education should involve the creation of a dialogic discourse among members of a class that enable them to develop CT. One of the central features in argumentation is the development of epistemic criteria for knowledge evaluation ( Jiménez Aleixandre and Erduran, 2008 ), which is a necessary skill to be a critical thinker. We see the practice of CT as the articulation of cognitive skills through the practice of argumentation ( Giri and Paily, 2020 ).

This article argues that science education needs to explore learning experiences and ways of instruction that support CT by engaging learners in argumentation on SSIs. Despite CT being considered a seminal goal in education and the large body of research on CT supporting this ( Dominguez, 2018 ), debates still persist about the manner in which CT skills can be achieved through education ( Abrami et al., 2008 ). Niu et al. (2013) remark that educators have made a striking effort to foster CT among students, showing that the belief that CT can be taught and learned has spread and gained support. Therefore, CT has slowly made its way into general school education and specific instructional interventions. Problem-based learning is one of the most widely used learning approaches nowadays in CT instruction ( Dominguez, 2018 ) because it is motivating, challenging, and enjoyable ( Pithers and Soden, 2000 ; Niu et al., 2013 ). We see active learning methodologies and real-word problems such as SSIs as appropriate contexts for CT development.

The view that CT can be developed by engagement in argumentation practices plays a central role in this study, as Kuhn (2019) suggested. However, the post-truth condition poses some challenges to the evaluation of sources of information and scientific evidence disseminated by social media. According to Sinatra and Lombardi (2020) , the post-truth context raises the need for critical evaluation of online information about SSIs. Students need to be better prepared to assess science information they can easily find online from a variety of sources. Previous studies described by these authors emphasized the importance of source evaluation instruction to equip students toward this goal ( Bråten et al., 2019 ), however, this is not sufficient. Sinatra and Lombardi (2020) note that students should learn how to evaluate the connections between sources of information and knowledge claims. This requires, from our view, engaging students in CT and epistemic performance. If we want students to learn to think critically about the claims they will encounter on social media, they need to practice argumentation as critical evaluation.

We draw on research on epistemic education ( Chinn et al., 2018 ) which considers that learning science entails students’ participation in the science epistemic goals ( Kelly and Licona, 2018 ); in other words, placing scientific practices at the center of SSI instruction. Our study is framed in a broader research project that aims to embed CT in epistemic design and performance. In Chinn et al. (2018) AIR model, epistemic cognition has three core elements that represent the three letters of the acronym: epistemic Aims, goals related to inquiry; epistemic Ideals, standards and criteria used to evaluate epistemic products, such as explanations or arguments; and Reliable processes for attaining epistemic achievements. Of particular interest for our focus on CT is that the AIR model also proposes that epistemic cognition has a social nature, and it is situated. The purpose of epistemic education ( Barzilai and Chinn, 2017 ) should be to enable students to succeed in epistemic activities ( apt epistemic performance ), such as constructing and evaluating arguments, and to assess through meta-competence when success can be achieved. This paper attends to one aspect of epistemic performance proposed by Barzilai and Chinn (2017) , which is cognitive engagement in epistemic assessment. Epistemic assessment encompasses in our study the evaluation of the content of claims disseminated by media. Aligned with these authors we understand that this process requires cognitive and metacognitive competences. Thus, epistemic assessment needs adequate disciplinary knowledge, but also meta-cognitive competence for recognizing unsupported beliefs.

Goal and Research Questions

This paper examines students’ competence to engage in argumentation and CT in an online task that requires them to critically assess diverse information presented in media headlines on COVID-19. Competence in general can be defined as “a disposition to succeed with a certain aim” ( Sosa, 2015 , p. 43) and epistemic competence, as a special case of competence, is at its core a dispositional ability to discern the true from the false in a certain domain. For the purposes of this paper, the attention is on epistemic competence, being the research questions that drive the analysis of the following:

1. What is the competence of students to assess the credibility of COVID-19 information appearing in news headlines?

2. What is the level of epistemic assessment showed in students’ arguments according to the criteria appealed while assessing COVID-19 news headlines?

Materials and Methods

Context, participants, and design.

A teaching sequence about COVID-19 was designed at the beginning of the lockdown in Spain (Mid-March 2020) in response to the rise of misinformation about coronavirus on the internet and social media. The design process involved collaboration between the first and second author (researchers in science education) and the third author (a biology teacher in secondary education).

The participants are a group of twenty secondary students (14–15 years old), eleven of them girls, from a state public school located in a well-known seaside village in Galicia (Spain). They were mostly from middle-class families and within an average range of ability and academic achievement.

Students were from the same classroom and participated in previous online activities as part of their biology classes, taught by their biology teacher, who collaborated on previous studies on CT and learning science through epistemic practices on health controversies.

The activities were integrated in their biology curriculum and carried out when participants received instruction on the topics of health, infectious diseases, and the immune system.

Google Forms was used for the design and implementation of all activities included in the sequence. The reason to select Google Forms is that it is free and a well-known tool for online surveys. Besides, all students were familiar with its use before the lockdown and the teacher valued its usefulness for engaging them in online debates and in their own evaluation processes. This online resource provides anonymous results and statistics that the teacher could share with the students for debates. It needs to be highlighted that during the lockdown students did not have the same work conditions; particularly, quality and availability of access to the internet differed among them. Thus, all activities were asynchronous. They had 1 week to complete each task and the teacher could be consulted anytime if they had difficulties or any question regarding the activities.

The design was inspired by a previous one carried out by the authors when the first case of Ebola disease was introduced in Spain ( Puig et al., 2016 ), and follows a constructivist and scientific-based approach. The sequence began with an initial task, in which students were required to express their own views and knowledge on COVID-19 and health notions related with it, before then being progressively involved in the application of knowledge through the practice of modeling and argumentation. The third activity engaged them in critical evaluation of COVID-19 information. A more detailed description of the activities carried out in the different steps of the sequence is provided below.

Stage 1: General Knowledge on Health Notions Related to COVID-19

An individual Google Forms survey around some notions and health concepts that appear in social media during the lockdown, such as “pandemic”, “virus,” etc.

Stage 2: Previous Knowledge on Coronavirus Disease

This stage consisted of three parts: (2.1) Individual online survey on infectious diseases; (2.2) Introduction of knowledge about infectious diseases provided in the e-bugs project website 1 and activities; virtual visit to the exhibition “Outbreaks: epidemics in a connected world” available in the Natural History Museum website (blinded for review); (2.3) Building a poster with the chain of infection of the COVID-19 disease and some relevant information to consider in order to stop the spread of the disease.

Stage 3: COVID-19, Sources of Information

This stage consisted first of a virtual forum in which students shared their own habits when consulting scientific information, particularly coronavirus-related, and debated on the main media sources they used to consult for this purpose. Secondly, students had to analyze ten news headlines on COVID-19 disseminated by social media during the outbreaks; six corresponded to fake news and four were true. They were asked to critically assess them and distinguish which they thought were true, providing their arguments. Media sources were not provided until the end of the task, since the act of asking for the source was considered as part of the data analysis (see Table 1 ). The second part of this stage is the focus of our analysis.

Table 1. COVID-19 News Headlines provided to students.

Stage 4: Act and Raise Awareness on COVID-19

The sequence ended with the creation of a short video in which the students had to provide some tips to avoid the transmission of the virus. The information provided in the video must be supported and based on established scientific knowledge.

Data Corpus and Analysis

Data collection includes all individual surveys and activities developed in Google Forms. We analyzed students’ individual responses ( N = 28) presented in Stage 3. The research is designed as a qualitative study that utilizes the methods of discourse analysis in accordance with the data and the purpose of the study. Discourse analysis allows the analysis of the content (implicit or explicit) of written arguments produced by students, and so the examination of the research questions. Our analysis focuses on students’ arguments and criteria used to assess the credibility of COVID-19 headlines (ten headlines in total). It was carried out through an iterative process in which students’ responses were read and revised several times in order to develop an open-coded scheme that captures the arguments provided. To ensure the internal reliability of our codes, each student response was examined by the first and the second author separately and then contrasted and discussed until 100% agreement was achieved. The codes obtained were established according to the following criteria, summarized in Table 2 .

Table 2. Code scheme for research questions 1 and 2.

For Research Question 1, we distributed the arguments in two main categories: (1) Arguments that question the credibility of the information ; (2) Arguments that do not question the credibility of the information.

For Research Question 2, we classify arguments that question the credibility of the headline in accordance with the level of epistemic assessment into three levels (see Table 2 ). The level of epistemic assessment (basic, medium, and high) was established by the authors based on the criteria that students applied and expressed explicitly or implicitly in their arguments. These criteria emerged from the data, thus the categories were not pre-established; they were coded by the authors as the following: content (using the knowledge that each student has about the topic), source (questioning the origin of the information), evidence (appealing to empirical evidence as real live situations that students experienced), authority (justifying according to who supports or is behind the claim) and scientific procedure (drawing on the evolution of scientific knowledge).

Students’ Competence to Critically Assess the Credibility of COVID-19 Claims

In general, most students were able to distinguish fallacious from true headlines, which was an important step to assess their credibility. For those that were false, students were able to question their credibility, providing arguments against them. On the contrary, for true news headlines, as it was expected, most participants developed arguments supporting them. Thus, they did not question their content. In both cases, the arguments elaborated by students appealed to different criteria discussed in the next section of results.

As shown in Table 3 , 147 arguments were elaborated by students to question the false headlines; they created just 22 arguments to assess the true ones. This finding was expected by the authors, as arguments for questioning or criticality appear more frequently when the information presented differs from students’ opinions.

Table 3. Number of students who questioned or not each news headline on COVID-19.

Students showed a higher capacity for questioning those claims they considered false or fake news , which can be related to the need to justify properly why they consider them false and/or what should be said to counter them.

The headlines that were most controversial, meaning they created diverse positions among students, were these three: “The COVID-19 virus can be transmitted in areas with hot and humid climates,” “Skin manifestations (urticaria, chilblains, rashes…) could be among the mild symptoms of coronavirus” and “Antibiotics are effective in preventing and treating coronavirus infection.”

The first two were questioned by 11 students out of 28, despite being real headlines. According to students’ answers, they were not familiar with this information, e.g., “I think the heat is not good for the virus.” On the contrary, 17 students did not question these headlines, arguing for instance as this student did: “because it was shown that both in hot climates and in cold climates it is contagious in the same way.”

A similar situation happened with the third headline, which is false. A proportion of students (9 out of 28) accepted that antibiotics could help to treat COVID-19, showing in their answers some misunderstanding regarding the use of antibiotics and the diseases they could treat. The rest of the participants (19 out of 28) questioned this headline, affirming that “because antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections and coronavirus is a virus,” among other justifications for why it was false.

Levels of Epistemic Assessment in Students’ Arguments on COVID-19 News Headlines

To analyze the level of epistemic assessment showed in students’ arguments when dealing with each headline, attention was focused on the criteria students applied (see Table 2 ). As Table 4 summarizes, almost all arguments included only one criterion (139 out of 169), and 28 out of 169 did not incorporate any criterion. These types of arguments can be interpreted as low epistemic assessment, or even without epistemic assessment if no criterion is included.

Table 4. Arguments used by students to assess the credibility of each COVID-19 headline.

In the category of Basic Epistemic Assessment , we include all students’ arguments that included one criterion: Content or Empirical Evidence. Students assessed the content of the claim appealing to their own knowledge about that piece of information or to empirical evidence, without posing critical questions for assessing the credibility of the source of information. These two criteria, content and evidence, were included in students’ arguments with a frequency of 86 and 23, respectively, with this category the most common (109 out of 169) when questioning false and true headlines. In the case of true headlines, arguments under this category were identified in relation to headlines 2 and 4, whose credibility were questioned by appealing to the content, such as: “those are not the symptoms (skin manifestations) ” . Examples of arguments assessing the content of false headlines are provided below:

“Because the virus is inside the body, and even if you injected alcohol into the body it would only cause intoxication”

This student rejects headline 5, appealing to the fact that alcohol causes intoxication rather than the elimination of coronavirus.

“I know a person who had coronavirus and they only gave him paracetamol”

In this example, the student rejects headline 6 and appeals to his/her own experience during the pandemic, particularly a close person who had coronavirus, as evidence against the use of antibiotics for coronavirus disease treatment.

The category Medium Epistemic Assessment gathers arguments that make critical questions, particularly those asking for information about the authority or the source of information. For us, these criteria reflect a higher level of epistemic performance since they imply questioning beyond the veracity of the headline itself to its sources and authorship. There are 20 out of 169 arguments coded within this category.

The assessment of true headlines includes arguments that question the authority and source, e.g., “because they said it on the news” (headline 2), “that news does not seem very reliable to me” (headline 4). It is also an ordinary category in questioning false headlines, since students appealed to the source (16), “because in the news they clarified that it was a fake news and because it is not credible either” (headline 10) or the authority (4), “because the professionals said they were more vulnerable (people over 70 years old) but not that it only affected them” (headline 7).

For the highest category, High Epistemic Assessment , we consider those arguments (12 out of 169) in which students appealed to the scientific procedure (11) to justify why the headline is false, which manifests students’ reliance on epistemic processes, e.g., “because treatments that protect against coronavirus are still being investigated” (headline 9). Also, under this category we include arguments that combined more than one criterion, content and scientific procedure “Because antibiotics don’t treat those kinds of infections. In addition, no medication has yet been discovered that can prevent the coronavirus” (headline 6). Students’ arguments included in this category were elaborated to assess false headlines.

Lastly, a special mention is afforded to those arguments that did not include any criteria (28), which are contained in the category Non-Epistemic Assessment. It appears more frequently in students’ answers to headlines 8 and 10, as these examples show: “I don’t think it’s true because it doesn’t make much sense to me” (headline 8) or “I never heard it and I doubt it’s true” (regarding drinking alcohol, headline 10).

The findings of our study indicate that students were able to deal with fake news , identifying it as such. They showed capacity to critically assess the content of these news headlines, considering their inconsistencies in relation to their prior knowledge ( Britt et al., 2019 ). As Evagorou (2020) pointed out, SSIs are appropriate contexts for CT development and to value the relevance of science in our lives.

The examination of RQ1 shows that a proportion of students were able to perceive the lack of evidence behind them or even identified that those statements contradict what science presents. This is a remarkable finding and an important skill to fight against attempts to diminish trust in science produced in the post-truth condition ( Dillon and Avraamidou, 2020 ). CT and argumentation are closely allied ( Andrews, 2015 ) but as the results show, knowledge domain seems to play an important role in assessing SSIs news and their implications. Specific CT requires some of the same skills as generalizable CT, but it is highly contextual and requires particular knowledge ( Jones, 2015 ).

Students’ prior knowledge influenced the critical evaluation of some of the COVID-19 headlines provided in the activity. This is particularly relevant in responses to headline 6 (false) “Antibiotics are effective in preventing and treating coronavirus infection.” A previous study on the interactions between the CT and knowledge domain on vaccination ( Ageitos and Puig, 2021 ) showed that there is a correspondence between them. This points to the importance of health literacy for CT development, although it would not be sufficient to provide students with adequate knowledge only, as judgment skills, in this case regarding the proper use of antibiotics, are also required.

We found that the level of epistemic assessment (RQ2) linked to students’ CT capacity is low. A big majority of arguments were situated in a basic epistemic assessment level, and just a few in a higher epistemic assessment. One reason that might explain these results could be related to the task design and format, in which students worked autonomously in a virtual environment. As CT studies in e-learning environments have reinforced ( Niu et al., 2013 ), cooperative or collaborative learning favors CT skills, particularly when students have to discuss and justify their arguments on real-life problems. The circumstances in which students had to work during the outbreak did not allow them to work together since internet connections were not good for all of them, so synchronous activities were not possible. This aspect is a limitation for this research.

There were differences in the use of criteria, and thus in the level of epistemic assessment, when students dealt with true and false headlines. This could be related to diverse factors, such as the language. The claims are marred by language and they are formulated in a different way. Particularly, it is quite nuanced in true statements while certain and resolute in false headlines. The practice of CT requires an understanding of the language, the content under evaluation and other cognitive skills ( Andrews, 2015 ).

In the case of false headlines, most arguments appealed to their content and less to the criteria of source, authority, and the scientific procedure, whereas in the case of true headlines most of them appealed to the authority and/or source. According to the AIR model ( Chinn and Rinehart, 2016 ), epistemic ideals are the criteria used to evaluate the epistemic products, such as claims. In the case of COVID-19 claims, students need to have an ideal of high source credibility ( Duncan et al., 2021 ). This means that students acknowledge that information should be gathered from reliable news media that themselves obtained information from reliable experts.

Only few students used the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing false headlines, which shows a high level of epistemic assessment. Promoting this type of assessment is important since online discourse in the post-truth era is affected by misinformation and by appeals to emotions and ideology.

Conclusion and Implications

This research has been conducted during a moment in which the lives of people were paralyzed, and citizens were forced to stay at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease. During the lockdown and even after, apart from these containment measures, citizens in Spain and in many countries had to deal with a huge amount of information about the coronavirus disease, some of it false. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by dissemination of inaccurate information spread at high speed, making it more difficult for the public to identify verified facts and advice from trusted sources ( World Health Organization (WHO), 2020 ). As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have been carried out to analyze the impact of the pandemic on the life of children from diverse views ( Cachón-Zagalaz et al., 2020 ), but not from the perspective of exploring students’ ability to engage in the epistemic assessment of information and disinformation on COVID-19 under a situation of social isolation. This is an unprecedented context in many aspects, where online learning replaced in-person teaching and science uncertainties were more visible than ever.

Participants engaged in the epistemic assessment of coronavirus headlines and were able to put into practice their CT, arguing why they considered them as true or false by appealing to different criteria. We are aware that our results have limitations. Once such limitation is that students performed the activity independently, without creating a collaborative virtual environment, understood by the authors as one of the e-learning strategies that better promote CT ( Puig et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, despite the fact that teachers were available for students to solve any questions regarding the task, the remote and asynchronous process did not allow them to guide the activity in a way that helped the students to carry out a deeper analysis. CT development and epistemic cognition depends on many factors, and teachers have an important role in achieving these goals ( Greene and Yu, 2016 ; Chinn et al., 2020 ).

The analysis of arguments allows us to identify some factors that are crucial and directly affect the critical evaluation of headlines. Some of the students did not question the use of antibiotics for coronavirus disease. This result highlights the importance of health literacy and its interdependency with CT development, as previous studies on vaccine controversies and CT show ( Puig and Ageitos, 2021 ). Although it is not the focus of this paper; the results point to the importance of making students aware of their knowledge limitations for critical assessment. A key instructional implication from this work is making e-learning activities more cooperative, as we have noted, and epistemically guided. Moreover, CT dimensions could be made explicit in instructional materials and assessments. If we want to prepare students to develop CT in order to face real/false news spread by social media, we need to engage them in deep epistemic assessment, namely in the critical analysis of the content, the source, procedures and evidence behind the claims, apart from other tasks. Promoting students’ awareness and vigilance regarding misinformation and disinformation online may also promote more careful and attentive information use ( Barzilai and Chinn, 2020 ), thus activities oriented toward these goals are necessary.

Our study reinforces the need to design more CT activities that guide students in the critical assessment of diverse aspects behind controversial news as a way to fight against the rise of disinformation and develop good knowledge when dealing with SSIs. Students’ epistemological views can influence their performance on argumentation thus, if uncertainty of knowledge is explicitly address in SSI instruction and epistemic activities, students’ epistemological views may be developed, and such development may in turn influence their argumentation competence and consequently their performance on CT.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

Written informed consent was obtained from the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin to participate in this study in accordance with the National Legislation and the Institutional Requirements.

Author Contributions

BP conducted the conceptual framework and designed the research study. PB-A conducted the data analysis and collaborated in manuscript preparation. JP-M implemented the didactical proposal and collected the data. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the project ESPIGA, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities, partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Grant code: PGC2018-096581-B-C22.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This study was carried out within the RODA research group during the lockdown in Spain due to COVID-19 pandemic. We gratefully acknowledge all the participants for their implication, despite such difficult circumstances.

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Keywords : critical thinking, argumentation, socio-scientific issues, COVID-19 disease, fake news, epistemic assessment, secondary education

Citation: Puig B, Blanco-Anaya P and Pérez-Maceira JJ (2021) “Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19. Front. Educ. 6:646909. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.646909

Received: 28 December 2020; Accepted: 09 March 2021; Published: 03 May 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Puig, Blanco-Anaya and Pérez-Maceira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Blanca Puig, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Science Education for Citizenship through Socio-Scientific issues

The UNESCO Courier

Developing a critical mind against fake news

By Divina Frau-Meigs

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is often called to the rescue these days, as the media is threatened on all sides, in totalitarian and democratic regimes alike. The alert was sounded in France on 7 January 2015, when the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo , was attacked. It was an attack on one of the oldest forms of media in the world – caricature.

At the time, I was Director of the Centre pour l’éducation aux médias et à l’information (the centre for media and information literacy (CLEMI). We had to prepare students for their return to the classroom the day after the attack, and meet the needs of teachers and parents. We proceeded as we did after all major catastrophes – we searched our archives for educational fact sheets on caricature and propaganda, and posted media resources online (reference websites, a press review, a series of headlines). We also released an unpublished interview of Charb, which CLEMI had done in 2013, titled, “Can we laugh at everything?”. The cartoonist and journalist, whose real name was Stéphane Charbonnier, was murdered in the attack.

This crisis situation showed the strengths of MIL, but also its limitations. We were well-prepared to respond in terms of resources, but we did not anticipate the impact of social media.

Like pre-digital media, MIL must take a leap forward and include in its concerns what data does to the media – it pushes information to the fore through the regulation of algorithms, linked to people’s search histories. It can enclose people in a “filter bubble” to reinforce the biases of confirmation that support preconceived ideas, and reduce the diversity and pluralism of ideas by monetizing content (clicks by views). It is invasive of privacy and threatens fundamental freedoms by using digital footprints for purposes beyond the user’s control.

The latest crisis stemming from fake news – a blend of rumour, propaganda and plot theory – has shaken up MIL. Fake news is even stronger than disinformation, which is a toxic, but generally discernible mixture of truth and lies. Fake news is a phenomenon that falls into the category of disinformation, but its malicious intent is unprecedented, because information technology makes it trans-border and trans-media, and therefore viral.

Media and Information Literacy must imperatively take into account the digital transformation, which has moved from the “blue continent” to the “dark continent”. In other words, it has gone from surfing, babbling and chatting on platforms controlled by the GAFAM (an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), to noxious data mining for the purpose of massive manipulation and destabilization.

It is in this respect that the decoding of online propaganda is complex, because it is a question of deciphering a form of disruptive ideology, which is technologically innovative, but paradoxically represents a conservative global revolution − designed to create chaos in existing political systems rather than proposing a system of progressive political thought.

The return of gossip

This is why MIL is obliged to rethink the media and the political and ethical foundations that legitimize it. The role of social media needs to be revisited, as do the exchanges that take place on it. The growth of digital media, which transforms old audiences into new communities of sharing and interpretation, also needs to be taken into account. The renewed tendency to gossip manifested by social media is not insignificant and should not be treated with contempt. A conversation in undertones that conveys a jumble of rumours, half-truths and hearsay, gossip makes what is private, public. It places authenticity above a truth that is perceived as fabricated by elites, far from daily and local concerns.

Social media, then, conveys news where truth is uncertain, and falsehoods have been used to arrive at the truth or by showing that the truth is not all that clear-cut. Hence the temptation to categorize social media as “post-truth”. But this stance reduces its scope and refuses to see in it the quest for a different truth, when the supposedly gold-standard systems of information go bankrupt. Social media centres once again on the eternal journalistic battle between objective facts and commentary based on opinion, that is played out in these models of influence.

In the information-communication sciences, gossip falls within the category of social bonding. It fulfills essential cognitive functions: monitoring the environment, providing help in decision-making by sharing news, aligning a given situation with the values of the group, etc. These functions have traditionally legitimized the importance of the media. But the media is now perceived as deficient and biased – this is symptomized by the reliance on online gossip, relayed by social media. The blame falls less on social media than on those who are responsible for public debate in real life.

In destabilized political situations all around the world, social media is restoring meaning to the regulatory role of social narrative. It highlights the violations of social norms, especially when political institutions boast of transparency, because secrets are no longer safe. Set against newspapers that toe party lines, social media is disrupting the norms of objectivity, which has become fossilized by requiring the presentation of one opinion for and one against. The public shows distrust of the “veracity” of this polarized discourse and is seduced by the strategy of authenticity. It establishes a close relationship of trust with the community of members that now constitutes the audience, and aims to involve them in debates, while basing itself on the principle of transparency. Thus social media pits the ethics of authenticity against the ethics of objectivity.

Explorer, analyst and creator

Social media and fake news consequently make up a textbook case for MIL, which calls upon its fundamental competence − critical thinking. But this critical thinking must have an understanding of the added value of the digital: participation, contribution, transparency and accountability, of course, but also disinformation and the interplay of influence. The critical mind can be exercised and trained, and can also act as a form of resistance to propaganda and plot theory. Young people must be put in a position of responsibility while being protected by the adults around them: they can be prompted to call into question their use of social media and to take into account the criticism against the consequences of their practices. We must also trust their sense of ethics, once it is called upon. In my Massive Open Online Course on Media Education – the MOOC DIY MIL, which received the 2016 UNESCO Global MIL Award – I offer students three critical roles: explorer, analyst and creator. The explorer gets to know the media and data; the analyst applies the concepts, such as source verification, fact-checking, respect for privacy; the creator tries his/her hand at producing his/her own content, sees the consequences of his/her choices and makes decisions about distribution.

The MOOC has given birth to projects such as “ Citoyen journaliste sur Twitter ” (citizen journalist on Twitter) and “ HoaxBuster ”, against plot theories. In all cases, the point is to ensure that young people acquire the critical thinking reflexes of MIL, so that they can avoid the traps of hate speech, non-voluntary internet traces and fake news. Other initiatives exist, including some led by UNESCO, which has founded the Global Alliance of Partners on MIL (GAPMIL) −  MIL CLICKS is a recent project to take ownership of MIL via social media.

Scaling up MIL

It is also important that MIL exercises critical thinking against the media itself. It turns out that the top press organizations are among the biggest influencers and the ones who tend to push rumours, on Twitter for example, before they are confirmed. The fake news that circulates on Facebook, the first of the social media to spread it, draws its grain of truth from the fact that news professionals are overly responsive to the pressure of the scoop, transmitted before it is checked, in the same manner as the amateurs. And the denials do not generate as much buzz as the rumours!

It is clear that challenges still exist to significantly scaling up MIL. Decision makers need convincing that trainers must be trained, teachers and journalists alike. My research at the Université Nouvelle Sorbonne, within the framework of the TRANSLIT  project of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the UNESCO Chair in “Savoir-devenir in sustainable digital development”, consists of comparing public policies in Europe. It shows that many resources and training opportunities exist on the ground, provided by organizations or teachers on their own initiative, rather than sponsored by universities. It points, however, to a lag at the public policy level, despite the inclusion of MIL in many national educational programmes. There are few interministerial mechanisms, little or no co-regulation, and little or no multi-stakeholder coordination. The governance of MIL emerges as composite, with three models existing in different countries: development, delegation, or… disengagement (D. Frau-Meigs et al, 2017).  

An ethical leap

The good news is that journalists are becoming increasingly aware, revising their ethics and realizing the value of MIL. Their ethical leap can help teachers to reposition MIL and provide valid resources to bolster resistance in favour of the integrity of data and media. Actions that are re-establishing the value of in-depth investigation are already taking shape − using data journalism, which reveals information that cannot be obtained otherwise.

Scandals such as the colossal leak of confidential documents known as the  Panama Papers  have helped moralize political life and restore confidence in the press. Other actions are aimed specifically at fighting fake news using digital means. These include AFP Correspondent , the Agence France Presse blog (which reveals what happens backstage at a large news network); Décodex, featured in the French newspaper, Le Monde (which lists sites according to their unreliability), Google's RevEye (which checks whether an image is genuine in three clicks), and Conspi Hunter on Spicee, the online TV reports and documentaries platform (to debunk plot theories).

In order to be deployed fully and to create an educated citizenship, MIL’s critical thinking must also be applied to the geo-economy of social media. The GAFAM digital platforms, all under California law, have long refused to be classified as media companies, to avoid all social responsibility and to evade any related public-service obligations. But algorithmic monitoring has revealed the ability of GAFAM to exercise editorial control over content that is worth monetizing. In doing so, these organizations define the truth, because it is real or ethical.

The GAFAM mega-media have so far played the card of self-regulation: they make their own rules, they decide to remove sites or accounts suspected of conveying fake news, with no accountability for themselves. But they cannot resist the need for a responsible model for long – it will probably be a hybrid between a “common carrier” and “public trustee”, if they want to preserve the trust of their online communities. The communities could also organize themselves, and even circumvent them, to co-regulate the news with journalists, as is the case with Décodex. The option of co-designing an algorithm that would have journalistic ethics and fundamental freedoms built into its DNA is undoubtedly one of the alternatives to come, according to digital logic!

Divina Frau-Meigs

Divina Frau-Meigs (France) is a professor of information and communication sciences at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and holder of the UNESCO Chair “Savoir-devenir in sustainable digital development”. The author of several books, she has just published  Public Policies in Media and Information Literacy in Europe: Cross-Country Comparisons , which she has edited along with I. Velez and J. Flores Michel (London, Routledge, 2017).

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Critical media literacy in teacher education, theory, and practice.

• Jeff Share , Jeff Share University of California Los Angeles
• Tatevik Mamikonyan Tatevik Mamikonyan School of Education, University of California Los Angeles
•  and  Eduardo Lopez Eduardo Lopez University of California Los Angeles
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1404
• Published online: 30 September 2019
• This version: 20 September 2023
• Previous version

Democracy in the digital networked age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” requires new literacy skills and critical awareness to read, write, and use media and technology to empower civic participation and social transformation. Unfortunately, not many educators have been prepared to teach students how to think critically with and about the media and technology that engulf us. Across the globe there is a growing movement to develop media and information literacy curriculum (UNESCO) and train teachers in media education (e-Media Education Lab), but these attempts are limited and in danger of co-optation by the faster growing, better financed, and less critical education and information technology corporations. It is essential to develop a critical response to the new information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that are embedded in all aspects of society. The possibilities and limitations are vast for teaching educators to enter K-12 classrooms and teach their students to use various media, critically question all types of texts, challenge problematic representations, and create alternative messages. Through applying a critical media literacy framework that has evolved from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, students at all grade levels can learn to critically analyze the messages and create their own alternative media. The voices of teachers engaging in this work can provide pragmatic insight into the potential and challenges of putting the theory into practice in K-12 public schools.

• critical literacy
• critical pedagogy
• media education
• media literacy
• critical media literacy
• social justice
• politics of representation
• cultural studies
• teacher education

Updated in this version

The authors made minor revisions to this text to reflect more recent scholarship. The reference list and further readings have similarly been updated.

Introduction

It is a formidable challenge to prepare critical educators to work inside a system in which every brick in the wall has been laid to transmit the information, skills, and ideas necessary to reproduce the social norms, inequities, ideologies, and alienation that are undermining the quality and sustainability of life on this planet. However, education can be a powerful tool to challenge these problems and create opportunities for students to work in solidarity with others to create a more socially and environmentally just world. To support these changes, we need teachers ready to engage students in critical inquiry by posing questions about systemic and structural issues of power, hierarchies of oppression, and social injustice. In the current media and information age, information communication technologies (ICTs) are available to either continue the control and degradation or to deconstruct the systems of oppression and reconstruct a more just and sustainable society.

Digital technology is opening opportunities for individual participation and alternative points of view, while at the same time a handful of enormous media and technology corporations have become the dominant storytellers, often repeating the same story at the expense of countless different perspectives and creative ways of thinking. Many of these storytellers are actually story-sellers, more interested in peddling ideas and products than informing, enlightening, inspiring, or challenging. While young people are using more media, they are also being used more by media companies. Giant transnational corporations are targeting youth as one of the most valuable markets for building brand loyalty and selling to advertisers. Researchers found 8- to 18-year-olds in the United States spend well over 10 hours a day interacting with various forms of media, such as music, computers, video games, television, film, and print ( Rideout et al., 2011 ). Another investigation discovered that 95% of American 13- to 17-year-olds have access to a smartphone and 97% say they are online daily and 46% use it constantly ( Vogels et al., 2022 ).

Not only is the amount of time with media increasing but the quality of that engagement is also changing by becoming more commercial and rarely critical. Researchers at Stanford University administered six tasks to 3,466 high schools across 14 states in the US to judge their ability to assess online information. In one task, students were asked to evaluate the credibility of a website that claimed to “disseminate factual reports” and 96% failed to learn about the site’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a different task, over half of students believed an anonymously posted video purporting to show voter fraud in the US was real, even though it was filmed in Russia ( Breakstone et al., 2021 ). In another study, Vosoughi et al. (2018) examined approximately 126,000 stories tweeted over 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017 . The researchers were interested in understanding what accounted for the differential diffusion of verified true and false news stories. They found that false news stories spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it” (p. 5). In analyzing the tweets, the authors concluded, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted because people found them not only more novel but the stories also inspired emotional responses of fear, disgust, or surprise.

The concern about “fake news” has encouraged many people to recognize the need for critical readers and writers of media. Some have suggested that we simply need better cognitive skills to determine truth from lies. However, making sense of the media and our information society is far more complicated than a reductionist idea of simply finding the truth. Rather than judging information as either true or false, students need to learn to search for multiple sources, different perspectives, and various types of evidence to triangulate and evaluate findings. In order to best evaluate and understand the information, they also need to question the influence of media in shaping the message and positioning the audience. Since all knowledge is an interpretation ( Kincheloe, 2007 ), interpreting the meaning of a message is a complex process that requires skills to probe empirical evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze the medium and construction of the text, and explore the social contexts.

This is an opportunity for educators to guide their students to think critically with and about the ICTs and media that surround them. Morrell et al. (2013) argue that the technology itself will not bring about transformative educational change. “That change will only come through teachers who draw on critical frameworks to create learning communities where the use of these tools becomes an empowering enterprise” (p. 14). Therefore, the changes in media, technology, and society require critical media literacy (CML) that can support teachers and students to question and create with and about the very tools that can empower or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or mislead, and buy or sell everything from lifestyles to politicians. Now more than ever, teachers should encourage students to be reading, viewing, listening to, interacting with, and creating a multitude of texts, from digital podcasts to multimedia productions.

Teacher Education

Even though youth are immersed in a world in which media and technology have entered all aspects of their lives and society, few teacher education programs are preparing teachers to help their students to critically understand the potential and limitations of these changes. It is crucial that new teachers learn how to teach their K-12 students to critically read and write everything, from academic texts to social media.

This means that schools of education responsible for training the new wave of teachers must be up to date, not just with the latest technology, but more importantly, with critical media literacy (CML) theory and pedagogy in order to prepare teachers and students to think and act critically with and about media and technology. In Canada, where media literacy is mandatory in every grade from 1 to 12, most new teachers are not receiving media literacy training in their preservice programs ( Wilson & Duncan, 2009 ). Researchers investigating media education in the United Kingdom and the US have found that many teachers are unprepared to teach media education and that professional learning opportunities are limited ( Butler, 2020 ; Kirwan et al., 2003 ). The progress has been slow, especially considering that inclusion of media literacy in formal public education has a history dating back to the 1980s in Australia, Britain, and Canada. However, nonformal media education has been occurring in many parts of the world for decades ( Hart, 1998 ; Kaplún, 1998 ; Kubey, 1997 ; Pegurer Caprino & Martínez-Cerdá, 2016 ; Prinsloo & Criticos, 1991 ).

While it is difficult to know for sure who is and who is not teaching critically about media and technology ( Mihailidis, 2008 ), there seems to be an increased interest in media literacy in the United States. In 2022 , the National Council of Teachers of English published a position statement recommending implementation of media education in English Language Arts along with two special issue journal publications ( Lynch, 2021 ; Kist & Christel, 2022 ) devoted to critical media literacy, arguing that “media education must be an essential component of the professional identity of teachers” ( National Council of Teachers of English, 2022 ).

As technology and media continue to evolve and increasingly enter public and private spaces, more educators are recognizing the need for training new teachers about media literacy ( Domine, 2011 ; Goetze et al., 2005 ; Hobbs, 2007a ) and some are even addressing the need to teach about CML ( Flores-Koulish et al., 2011 ; Funk et al., 2016 ; Robertson & Hughes, 2011 ; Trust et al., 2022 ). Researchers Tiede et al. (2015) studied 64 universities or colleges of teacher education in Germany and 316 U.S. public educational institutions that provide teacher training and graduate studies, concluding that very few offer more than media didactics (basic educational technology that teaches with media, not about media). From their data in the United States, they report, “media education, with emphasis on the instructional practices associated with the critical evaluation of media, culture, and society, were scarce, representing only 2% of all study programs in teacher training programs” (pp. 540−541). In Germany, the percentage increases to 25%, but “media didactics tends to be emphasized to the disadvantage of media education in both countries” (p. 542).

In 2011 , the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a curriculum guide online in 11 languages for training teachers in media education ( Grizzle & Wilson, 2011 ), declaring that “teacher training in media and information literacy will be a major challenge for the global education system at least for the next decade” ( Pérez-Tornero & Tayie, 2012 , p. 11). 1 In Europe, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) analyzed the successes and challenges of training preservice and in-service teachers about media and digital literacy. An initiative called e-Media Educational Lab, funded by the European Commission, provided blended training to 279 preservice teachers and 81 in-service teachers in six countries. Based on surveys and fieldnotes, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) reported that the preservice and in-service teachers found critical media analysis and media production to be very important; they described their intent to transfer their media competency to their classrooms and expressed a desire to learn more practical ways to help their students develop media competencies.

UNESCO’s approach to media education combines media and information literacy (MIL) to include many competencies, from learning about and using information communication technologies to thinking critically about ethics and democracy. Carolyn Wilson (2012) explains, “MIL is both a content area and way of teaching and learning; it is not only about the acquisition of technical skills, but the development of a critical framework and approaches” (p. 16).

Combining information technology with media-cultural studies is essential, but still infrequent. Within the current wave of educational reform that prioritizes the newest technology and career readiness over civic engagement and critical inquiry, schools are more likely to adopt only information technology or information literacy and not critical media education. In the United States, few universities offer more than a single course in media literacy and most do not even offer that ( Goetze et al., 2005 ; Meehan et al., 2015 ).

Schwarz (2001) asserts that because of the power of emerging literacies, “teacher education needs media literacy as an essential tool and an essential topic in the new millennium” (pp. 111−112). She calls for integrating media literacy across all subject areas of teacher education, “from methods courses and educational psychology to foundational courses and student teaching” (p. 118). This interdisciplinary approach for media education could be easier now for K-12 teachers in the United States since the Common Core State Standards require literacy to be taught and technology to be used across the curriculum ( California Common Core State Standards, 2013 ; Moore & Bonilla, 2014 ; Trust et al., 2022 ).

Two studies with a total of 31 preservice teachers found a discrepancy between their positive attitudes for teaching media literacy and the lack of attention and support in their teacher education programs to prepare them to teach MIL ( Gretter & Yadav, 2018 ). Based on interviews with these preservice teachers, Gretter and Yadav (2018) report that they associated MIL with critical thinking skills and expressed concerns about not knowing how to teach MIL because their teacher preparation program encouraged “teaching with technology and not necessarily about technology” (p. 115). These preservice teachers complained about “a lack of preparation to help them transfer their knowledge of digital media to MIL pedagogies that would benefit students” (p. 111). This highlights the importance of preparing educators with the theory and conceptual understandings as well as the pedagogy and practical applications for how to teach their students to critically analyze and create media.

Teaching Teachers Critical Media Literacy

Transforming education to critically use media, technology, and popular culture for social and environmental justice is the overarching goal of a critical media literacy (CML) course in the teacher education program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The authors of this article have been involved in designing and teaching this course to in-service and preservice teachers. Through combining theory from cultural studies and critical pedagogy with practical classroom applications of digital media and technology, this course prepares K-12 educators to teach their students how to critically analyze and create all types of media. In 2011 , this four-unit course on CML was officially approved and became a required class for all students working on their teaching credential at UCLA.

The teacher education program at UCLA is primarily a two-year master’s and credential program that accepts about 130 candidates annually. The program is committed to developing social justice educators to work with and improve the schooling conditions of California’s ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse children. While most of the students go through the two-year program, additional pathways for earning a teaching credential and master’s degree have been offered, such as a master’s-only program for in-service teachers with two years or more of full-time teaching experience.

The CML class is taught in separate sections, usually divided by subjects, with 25−50 students per section. Most of the candidates taking the class are student teaching at the same time, except for the master’s-only candidates, who were teaching full-time while attending the class once a week in the evening. The class includes lectures, discussions, and activities interwoven into each session during the 10-week quarter.

Beginning with a theoretical overview, the course explores the development of media education that is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills and more as a framework of conceptual understandings ( Buckingham, 2003 ). Much of the theory behind CML has evolved from cultural studies, a field of critical inquiry that began in the 20th century in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how media culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social control. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Kellner (1995) explains that cultural studies has continued to grow and incorporate concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Incorporating a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory, cultural studies critiques media culture as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives ( Hammer & Kellner, 2009 ).

Critical media literacy includes three dimensions ( Share & Gambino, 2022 ). The first involves the content students learn about systems, structures, and ideologies that reproduce hierarchies of power and knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality and other forms of identity and environmental justice, as well as general understandings about how media and communication function. The second dimension engages the skills to critically think and question media representations and biases, to deconstruct and reconstruct media texts, and use a variety of media to access, analyze, evaluate, and create. The third involves developing a disposition for empathy, critical consciousness, and empowerment to take action to challenge and transform society to be more socially and environmentally just. This third dimension is based on Freire’s (2010) notion of conscientização , a revolutionary critical consciousness that involves perception as well as action against oppression. These three dimensions of critical media literacy pedagogy are supported through an inquiry-based democratic approach that follows ideas of transformative educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire. We incorporate feminist theory and critical pedagogy to analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power ( Carlson et al., 2013 ; Garcia et al., 2013 ). When we first began teaching the course, we used a simple framework with five core concepts and key questions from the Center for Media Literacy. 2 To emphasize the critical potential of these ideas, while providing an accessible tool for teachers to use in the classroom, the following critical media literacy framework was developed, with six conceptual understandings and questions, as shown in Table 1 ( Kellner & Share, 2019 ).

These six conceptual understandings and questions are referred to regularly and are addressed in all lesson plans. It is important for teachers to understand the concepts and questions because theory should inform practice for all three dimensions. However, it is better for K-12 students to learn to ask the questions rather than memorize the concepts, since the questions, with appropriate guidance, can lead students on a path of inquiry where they are more likely to make meaning themselves, related to the conceptual understandings.

The CML framework is designed to help teachers and their students question the role of power and ideology that socialize and control society through making some people and ideas seem “normal” and “natural” while the rest are “othered” and “marginalized” ( Hall, 2003 ). This critical framing supports teachers and students to deepen their explorations of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, overconsumption, environmental exploitation, and other problematic representations in media. Candidates analyze and discuss current media examples, while also learning how to use various ICTs to create their own media with alternative counter-hegemonic representations. Using an inquiry process and democratic pedagogy, problems are posed to the students to collaboratively wrestle with, unpack, and respond to through media production.

Critical media literacy promotes an expansion of our understanding of literacy to include many types of texts, such as images, sounds, music, video games, social media, advertising, popular culture, and print, as well as a deepening of critical analysis to explore the connections between information and power. In our digital networked media age, it is not enough to teach students how to read and write just with print while their world has moved far beyond letters on a page. Literacy education in the 21st century requires breaking from traditional practices to include all the varied ways people communicate with media, technology, and any tool that facilitates the transfer of information or connects people. This calls for new skills and understandings to decode and analyze as well as to create and produce all types of texts. The California Teaching Performance Expectations also require teacher education programs to expand this view of literacy and integrate media and technology into coursework in order to “deepen teaching and learning to provide students with opportunities to participate in a digital society and economy” ( California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2016 , p. 9).

Each class starts by reviewing and applying the conceptual understandings and questions. Since one goal of the course is for candidates to understand that literacy includes reading and writing all types of texts, we encourage students to analyze as well as produce media. A series of assignments requires candidates to work together to create various types of media projects such as visual posters, photographs, podcasts, memes, digital stories, and social media. The candidates are also expected to work collaboratively on a CML lesson plan and learning segment that they write up, present a summary of to the whole class, and when possible, also teach it. For a detailed description of this course, see Share (2015) and visit the UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide for links to articles, videos, and websites used in the course. 3

Table 1. Critical Media Literacy Framework

From a desire to explore if and how former students are applying the skills and knowledge gained from the critical media literacy (CML) course into their teaching practice, we created an online survey for students who had taken the course. Through purposeful sampling, we sent out the survey to the 738 students who had taken the CML course and ended up with 185 usable responses (25% response rate), 153 preservice and 32 in-service teachers. Of the 185 respondents, 53 taught elementary school and 132 were secondary-level teachers. The breakdown of the middle school and high school teachers was: 38 science, 34 math, 33 social sciences, 28 English, and several reported teaching a combination of subjects as well as some who taught other areas such as music, visual arts, Spanish, English language development, or adult education. The span of experience was wide; some just started teaching and some had been teaching over seven years, yet most of the teachers (52%) had been teaching between two and three years.

The mixed method survey included 20 questions. The first eight sought to identify participants’ teaching background. The remaining 12 questions inquired about their experiences teaching CML skills and concepts to their K-12 students. Ten quantitative questions used a Likert scale with a choice of responses, including very frequently, frequently, occasionally, rarely, and never, as well as an option to choose not applicable. The final two qualitative questions were open-ended in which respondents could type their thoughts about any “memorable moment(s) teaching critical media literacy” and “any additional comments.” During the analysis phase, we found it helpful to combine the categories very frequently and frequently and refer to them as VF/F.

Voices From the Field

Using mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative data, we analyzed the survey responses to explore teachers’ ideas about what they had been doing with their students. The overall feedback suggested that the majority of the respondents had brought aspects of media literacy education into their K-12 classrooms, and sometimes even incorporated CML. One of the most recurring patterns we noticed was that these teachers had been expanding the traditional concept of literacy by engaging their students with various types of media.

Teaching With Media

In reply to the first question, most of the respondents reported having integrated media into their class activities: 64% VF/F, 30% occasionally, 6% rarely, and no one responded never ( N = 185). The responses to Question 1 were very similar for elementary and secondary teachers, with only a 1% to 5% difference. Where we saw greater variation was when comparing the subject matter of secondary teachers. The English and science teachers had the highest percentages (75% and 76%) of VF/F responses to Question 1 about integrating media into class activities. Math teachers, by contrast, reported the lowest percentage, with 44% reporting VF/F and 15% rarely integrating media into the curriculum (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Responses from secondary teachers to Question 1 about how often they integrated media into class activities.

While these responses demonstrated an overall high amount of media integration, it was not clear how the teachers integrated media and what students were doing with the media. The responses from Question 5 (“my students have created the following media”) provided more information about the students’ interactions with media, showing that the vast majority of respondents (92%) had their students create some type of media (see Figure 2 for a list of the various media students created).

Since the question only asked teachers to check the box for the type of media their students created, we did not know how often this occurred or with what degree of analysis. Questions 1 and 5 indicated that teaching with media occurred with over 90% of the respondents.

Figure 2. Responses to Question 5 about the different types of media that all 185 respondents report their students have created. They were asked to choose all that apply.

Teaching About Media

The second question tried to find out more about those interactions with media by asking respondents to rate how often they had given their “students opportunities to engage in media analysis.” For Question 2, about one-third of all 185 respondents, 32%, reported VF/F, 43% occasionally, 21% rarely, and 4% never. When comparing responses from Questions 1 and 2, the respondents seemed to have been doing more teaching with media (Question 1) than teaching about media (Question 2) (see Figure 3 ). A similar finding was mentioned in the research conducted in Germany and the United States by Tiede et al. (2015) .

Figure 3. Comparing all responses from Question 1 about integrating media into class activities (teaching with media) with Question 2 about engaging in media analysis (teaching about media).

A more nuanced perspective of Question 2 is possible when comparing the responses about media analysis from different content area secondary teachers. In response to Question 2, the teachers who reported VF/F were the following: 63% of English teachers reported giving the most opportunities for their students to engage in media analysis, as compared to almost half as often by 32% of science teachers and about five times less often by 12% of math teachers (see Figure 4 ). Since literacy is a primary goal of English instruction, it is not surprising that English teachers reported the highest levels of media analysis ( Hobbs, 2007b ).

It is important to recognize that teaching about media can be a highly complex and multifaceted undertaking, especially when done through a CML lens. For example, the second conceptual understanding encourages students to analyze the codes and conventions of the media text and the medium through which they travel by asking how the text was constructed and delivered or accessed. This, in itself, can have many layers and yet is just one of six questions intended to help students think critically about media. Livingstone (2018) asserts, “media literacy is needed not only to engage with the media but to engage with society through the media .” As Luke and Freebody (1997) argue, it is not enough to only have a psychological approach to literacy, as if reading and writing is just an individual cognitive process. We need to also bring a sociological lens into the process of questioning the contexts, the dominant ideologies, and the systems that make some things seem “natural” or “normal.” The CML framework is a holistic tool for thinking about and questioning the dynamic role media play in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and society. Responses and comments to other questions in the survey provide more insight into how some teachers have engaged their students in various types of media analysis.

Figure 4. Comparing responses from different content areas about Question 2 regarding how often secondary teachers gave their students opportunities to engage in media analysis.

Evaluating Information and Advertising

In the qualitative responses to Questions 11 and 12, teachers mentioned embracing basic media literacy principles in the ways students were evaluating the credibility of information and advertising as well as creating different types of media. The popularity of the term “fake news” and the growing amount of disinformation have increased the challenge to distinguish misinformation and propaganda from journalism and scientifically researched facts ( Rogow, 2018 ). An elementary teacher who reported “frequently” integrating media into the classroom, asserted:

Though my students are younger and some of these concepts are more difficult to teach than others, I find it important to bring up especially in terms of making sure they don’t believe every YouYube video they watch. We’ve had many meaningful discussions about what can be created for a video shouldn’t just be accepted as the truth. For example, the ‘mermaid’ documentary that came out a few years ago had all of my students convinced that they had found a mermaid. It led to an interesting discussion on hoaxes and further reading about Bigfoo[t] and other such stories.

Since all media contain bias because they are created by subjective humans, it is important for teachers to help their students to recognize the bias and also be able to judge the credibility of information. A high school math teacher wrote:

It has not happened until this school year, when I began teaching Statistics. I introduced some pictographs for students to analyze and an article for students to read about how a website stated that if polls were unskewed, Trump would be leading the polls for election. I had students read and discuss about the validity and why/why not it is trustable.

Several respondents mentioned having their students study political advertising, and since all U.S. elections are now multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns (e.g., Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign won the top prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards), there is little distinction between selling products, ideas, and political candidates.

Analyzing advertising is an important aspect of media education because advertising is the motor that drives commercial media and has become so common in our lives that there are few spaces that are completely ad-free ( Jhally, 2003 ). Several respondents reported about their students investigating advertisements for false health messages, misleading packaging, political campaigns, tobacco, alcohol, and different perspectives. One secondary English teacher wrote, “My students took pictures of advertisements that surrounded their neighborhood and we analyzed them for patterns, themes, and purposes.” A high school science teacher reported, “I had many times this past year where students were able to reflect on marketing strategies and how they affect the viewer’s perspective of their life and themselves. Students made great connections.”

During the critical media literacy (CML) class, students scrutinize consumer culture and the role advertising plays in creating anxieties, shaping desires, and normalizing representations about all things, from consumption to gender, race, and class. Candidates in the CML class learn about these ideas through readings, by analyzing advertisements, and also by creating ads for different target audiences. When asked about the media their students had created, one third reported their students created advertisements.

Creating Different Types of Media

When students are taught print literacy, they are instructed how to decode letters on a page and how to write with those letters to construct words, sentences, and paragraphs. The same process of teaching reading and writing should be applied to visual images, movies, songs, video games, social media, and all the various multimedia texts that students are encountering daily. In responses from the survey, teachers reported about having their students write and create many different types of texts beyond print (see Figure 2 ).

One English teacher wrote that having students create media was “very successful. They loved being able to create memes, posters, Prezis, etc. to present their work.” An elementary teacher shared about students “creating podcasts/npr style news stories regarding UN sustainability goals.” Several respondents commented on their students designing commercials or challenging ads by producing spoofs that parody the ads. One middle school teacher shared, “students analyzed ads for nicotine and alcohol products, then used the practice with critical media skills to create ‘anti-ads’ with Google drawings.”

During the first year of teaching, a high school science teacher reported about a memorable moment when “creating a multi-lingual, easy-to-understand and scientifically supported pamphlet on the hazards in LA’s environment.” A high school Spanish teacher wrote about his students creating critical memes in Spanish, like the ones they created in the critical media literacy (CML) class. During the session exploring racism and media, candidates challenge racist representations through creating racial myth-busting memes. As a strategy to demonstrate the value of media production, the CML class has students create various media in almost every session, and these activities are often the favorite lessons mentioned in the end of course evaluations.

Increasing Engagement

While engagement is not a learning objective, all teaching benefits from students being engaged in their learning. One of the patterns that emerged from the responses was teachers’ observations that student engagement increased. An eighth-grade English teacher wrote that after incorporating media literacy, the students’ “entire attitude toward learning shifted. Especially the hard to reach students.” An elementary teacher reported, “Media literacy has made great contributions in my class with science research in the past. The simple act of using google images, google maps and finding credible sources has sparked learning and interest in my class.” Another elementary teacher shared about using critical media literacy (CML) to analyze food justice issues: “They were instantly engaged and students who had a difficult time writing and with critical thinking then did not.”

A secondary science teacher reported, “Students spent the entire class engaged in discussion when I intended for it to only be an introduction to the unit.” Another high school science teacher wrote, “When I did teach a class specifically geared towards media literacy, it was great because students were engaged. They were quick at analyzing images and creating their own.” A third science teacher wrote, “using critical media literacy made engaging my students in abstract chemistry concepts more meaningful and engaging.” Engagement tends to increase when students are genuinely interested and intrinsically motivated, something that often comes out of personal connection, a sense of meaningfulness, and an authentic belief in the value of the learning ( Dewey, 1963 ). These are all elements of good CML pedagogy. A high school science teacher described the feelings of students and their parents as they responded to their CML work: “My favorite moments are students exuding pride and passion over the work they are creating that speaks to their perspectives and experiences; parents proud of their students’ media creations.” Feelings of pride and passion are important for all students to experience; they help lower students’ affective filters for learning ( Krashen, 1995 ) and increase intrinsic motivation to want to learn.

Critical Media Literacy

As we analyzed teachers’ written responses, we saw a number of comments in which they were taking basic media literacy concepts to deeper levels of criticality. Several mentioned how useful the class was to understanding critical theory and be able to see how it can be enacted in their K-12 classroom. Similar findings were mentioned after Joanou (2017) analyzed data about a critical media literacy (CML) class taught to master’s-level practicing K-12 educators. Joanou (2017) reported, “critical media literacy helps bridge the gap between theory and practice” (p. 40). The use of media texts and popular culture can provide relevant examples for entry into abstract concepts that are often politically and emotionally charged, and sometimes too sensitive or too distant to begin discussing on a personal level.

Teaching about the connections between information and power reflects a key goal of CML ( Kellner & Share, 2007 ) and our respondents demonstrated this through their qualitative comments about recreating counter-narratives, analyzing the politics of representation, making critical connections between history and current events with media texts, and engaging in political, social, and environmental media activism. Questions 3 and 4 attempted to assess the frequency in which teachers were bringing critical aspects of media education to their students.

Question 3 asks teachers to rate how often: “My students have engaged in media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.” Elementary and secondary teachers reported almost identical frequencies in response to Question 3: 22% in both groups reported VF/F while 42% (elementary) and 45% (secondary) stated occasionally. When asked Question 4 about making connections between information and power, the differences increased: 39% of the secondary teachers responded doing this VF/F while just 23% of the elementary teachers reported doing this VF/F.

In-service teachers reported higher frequencies for Question 3: 54% of in-service teachers reported VF/F while preservice teachers reported 14% VF/F. For Question 4: 56% of in-service teachers reported VF/F compared with 30% of preservice teachers who reported VF/F.

When comparing responses separated by subject matter with secondary teachers, 33% of English teachers and 30% of social science teachers reported VF/F for engaging in critical media analysis, as seen in Question 3 about exploring media representations. This is considerably higher than the 16% of science teachers and 9% of math teachers reporting VF/F. The math and science teachers reported the highest percentages for rarely or never having their students explore media representations of social justice issues (see Figure 5 ). The literature supports similar findings. Garii and Rule (2009) reported that student teachers had a difficult time integrating social justice into math and science content due to several factors. In their research with novice elementary teachers, Garii and Rule discovered that the candidates were not confident in their ability to teach math and science and had limited and unsophisticated knowledge of the content. They also viewed math and science “to be a set of routinized, algorithmic practices that lead to a single, correct answer and neither science nor mathematics are assumed to be closely connected to real-world issues and concerns” (p. 491). Given that they are struggling to learn and understand the content, math and science candidates turned to classroom textbooks to guide instructional practices. Incorporating nontraditional practices or making connections to students’ lives becomes a challenge because they disconnect social justice from their teaching and focus on teaching to the content ( Garii & Rule, 2009 ).

Figure 5. Responses to Question 3 from secondary teachers about how often they engaged their students in critical “media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.”

One of the more significant findings of the study is the number of respondents reporting they “noticed that using critical media literacy encourages critical thinking among students” (Question 9). Of the preservice respondents, 61% reported VF/F, and for the in-service teachers, the percentages jump to 81% who reported VF/F. In both cases, the majority of respondents expressed their feelings that CML promotes critical thinking most of the time (see Figure 6 ). A middle school social science teacher wrote that after teaching CML, “students were deeper thinkers and our discussions were so much richer. Students were highly engaged and more invested in the classroom.” When comparing grade levels for Question 9, we see 78% of elementary teachers reported that using CML VF/F encourages critical thinking, and 61% of secondary teachers reported VF/F. This large percentage of elementary teachers reporting about CML encouraging critical thinking shows great promise for the potential of CML in the early grades.

Figure 6. Comparison of preservice and in-service teachers’ responses to Question 9 about how often they have noticed CML encourages critical thinking among their students.

Creating Counter Narratives and Supporting Students’ Voices

Many of the responses regarding transformative education centered on guiding students to create counternarratives and supporting student ideas and voices. Respondents mentioned activities that enabled their students to recreate media texts with a critical lens. These counternarratives included recreating superhero comic books, news, advertisements, digital storytelling, national holiday observances, and poems. A high school English teacher noted, “after analyzing recent and popular superhero comic books, my students used the comic medium to tell an autobiographical story wherein they exhibited power in the face of oppression.” A middle school English teacher reported:

The most memorable lesson I’ve taught involving critical media literacy was a unit based on perseverance and the power of the human spirit in regards to power structures and oppression. After analyzing multiple types of media, students created their own VoiceThread using spoken word in order to share their own messages of perseverance. It was incredibly powerful to hear their messages.

For most respondents, the notion of enabling their students to share personal stories using multimedia tools meant that they were integrating critical media pedagogy into their teaching practice. Traditionally, personal and experiential knowledge as a form of literacy is not often valued; thus, it is a critical pedagogical orientation to encourage students to recreate media texts that reflect their intersecting realities and challenge the pervasive dominant ideologies. Students’ personal histories become scholarly pursuits when digital storytelling encompasses media production skills taught through a critical media literacy (CML) framework. Vasquez (2017) asserts, “students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should therefore be an important part of creating the classroom curriculum” (p. 8). A middle school math and technology teacher commented about incorporating CML into her master’s inquiry project:

The project we ultimately created was a digital storytelling project, in which students interviewed their parents or someone they admire and created some sort of media project around that story to tell counter-narratives to the dominant story told in media about people of color.

Guiding students to create counternarratives can be an empowering instructional strategy that nurtures their personal realities and supports their voice. Considering the context of urban education, it becomes particularly important for low-income students and students of color, who have been historically denied the power to be heard, to engage in their learning as empowered subjects through creating digital counter-narratives.

Politics of Representation

A major difference between critical media literacy (CML) and the more common media literacy practiced in the United States is the rigorous examination of the politics of representation; an analysis of how historically disenfranchised social groups are represented in media ( Funk et al., 2016 ). Many of the respondents discussed analyzing issues related to representations of different identities with their students. A high school visual arts teacher reported that through “using current events in the media, students created headline news with people of color perspective.” The majority of the responses highlighted engaging in discussions related to gender and a few responses about race. One elementary teacher noted:

My grade level did a Critical Media Literacy unit and after it was over, a week later, a student showed me a box of Chips Ahoy cookies and said that it was made to be sold to boys and girls. She compared it to a rainbow pop tarts box made for girls and a basketball cereal box made for boys that we had discussed during the CML unit.

A high school social science teacher reported:

My 11th and 12th grade Sociology class created representation boards. Each group was assigned an identity (‘white male,’ ‘Asian male,’ ‘black female,’ etc.). When each group was done, we compared the images and discussed the similarities between representations of race and gender. It really opened their eyes.

The politics of representation explores the complexities and intersections of identity markers, such as ethnicity, culture, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, and ableism. Several candidates alluded to the intersectionality between race and gender in their responses, mostly engaging their students in discussions related to the unequal representation and socialization of gender roles. They also noted that discussing stereotypical gender roles challenged their students’ internalized notions of gender. Responses such as the following highlight the shift in their students’ perspectives about gender: An elementary teacher wrote, “We’ve had some successful discussions around gender stereotypes and I’ve heard the language change in the classroom and students be more thoughtful about others’ choices.” Another elementary teacher reported, “My students showed greater acceptance. After teaching a lesson invoking gender all my male students felt accepted to choose any color paper—the favorite was pink for the rest of the year.”

Making Critical Connections

In response to the open-ended questions, an array of items was mentioned that demonstrate critical engagement, from teaching about racism and whitewashing, to numerous examples of analyzing gender and sexism, as well as projects on environmental justice and climate change at all grade levels. Some respondents discussed their transformative practice through the way their students analyzed and created media to make critical connections between historical and current events.

A high school social science teacher stated, “I had students create videos explaining the situation in Ukraine and relating it to the Cold War. In United States history, I often had students look at political cartoons and think about current examples of imperialism and how they’re represented in media.” Similarly, another social science teacher described a memorable moment of teaching critical media literacy (CML) as: “When students could make the connection between yellow journalism in Spanish-American War and media sensationalism during the War on Terror.” An elementary school teacher wrote:

My students began to think critically about history after showing them the spoken word poem ‘History Textbooks,’ which talked about world history being American Propaganda. Through this poem, they began questioning: who gets to write history and whose stories are told? It was a really powerful lesson we returned to over and over again throughout my course.

Analyzing media texts by acknowledging their historical continuity is vital because marginalization and exploitation are historically bound. Discovering these historical connections helps teachers and students learn how dominance and ideology are perpetuated, transcending time and space. Bridging the gap between the past and the present enables students to identify the common thread of hegemony across various spheres of social life. This instructional approach of CML promotes critical thinking with a social justice emphasis.

Another topic on which respondents commented was using CML to teach about environmental issues, especially the climate crisis. This is an important area for CML, since so many media messages about climate change distort the scientific evidence and mislead the public ( Beach et al., 2017 ; Share & Beach, 2022 ). A high school science teacher reported, “My class analyzed the politics behind climate change denial and how climate change is represented in the media. It was very easy for my students to see the connection between the message and its creators.” Exploring the connection between media ownership and media messages, another high school science teacher commented that a memorable moment was having a “discussion with students about where they were getting their information about environmental issues, and talking about who owns and controls Univision.”

In addition to becoming more aware, being engaged in critical analysis and creating counternarratives, some respondents noted that their students had engaged in political, environmental, and social media activism. A high school science teacher mentioned:

My class was looking at environmental justice and one student took that information and used it for an English project she was working on and that project transformed into a petition to the city council to plant more trees as her contribution to offsetting pollution in the inner city.

Another science teacher reported about how his “students created social media campaigns to raise awareness about animals affected by climate change. Different groups created the ‘Puffin Dance’ and #peekatmypika to help their campaigns get going.” A kindergarten teacher wrote about her students creating a video with opinion posters for change they shared with their school community.

Activism can be enacted in multiple ways; some efforts are more explicit, like petitions and protests, while others are more subtle, such as creating alternative media. Teacher responses reflect their students’ activism related to social, environmental, and political issues materialized through local and issue-specific efforts.

In analyzing the responses, we found many encouraging and hopeful comments about how critical media literacy (CML) has helped teachers rethink their pedagogy and increase student engagement. However, the responses also highlight challenges for implementing CML, such as limited resources, support, and clarity about how to integrate it into the curriculum. An elementary teacher wrote about the scarcity of technology at the school and how that “makes it difficult to do anything around critical media.” From the answers to Question 7 (incorporating CML into my teaching is difficult), secondary teachers reported more difficulty teaching CML (35% VF/F) than elementary teachers (26% VF/F). This is another place where the potential for CML in the lower grades surfaced, since they seem to have less difficulty incorporating it than secondary teachers. The design of most elementary classrooms, which requires the same teacher to cover all subject matter to the same group of students throughout the day, opens the potential for integrating CML pedagogy through thematic teaching, project-based learning, or problem-posing pedagogy.

A first-year middle school social science teacher shared wanting to use more CML, but had little departmental and administrative support. An elementary teacher shared about an administrator who “is reluctant to have me teach how to be critical of all media.” Three responses focused on wanting more resources, instructional strategies, and school-appropriate material in order to be able to implement CML in their classrooms. These qualitative statements of lack of support can be seen in the quantitative responses to Question 10 in which respondents rated the statement: “I feel supported by people at my school when teaching critical media literacy”: 36% VF/F, 24% occasionally, 18% rarely, 6% never felt supported, and 17% not applicable.

The group that shared the most challenges for implementing CML consisted of five teachers who taught secondary math and science. Their qualitative responses broadly discussed the difficulty of integrating CML into their content and finding only limited application. One of these responses from a high school math teacher mentioned:

I remember how when I was in the [CML] class, it seemed all over the place. I was unable to fully find the purpose of the class and how we can use it in a math class. In a traditional math class, such as Pre-Calculus or Calculus, it was rather difficult to find ways to incorporate the idea of CML.

This same person also commented that once he began teaching statistics, he was able to find ways to integrate CML. Of the 34 math teachers who answered Question 7, 59% of them reported that incorporating CML into their teaching was difficult VF/F. This is about double the VF/F responses from the other subjects.

A high school math teacher saw the value in teaching students CML but limited its application to challenging students’ misinformation about math and who is or is not a mathematician:

Critical Media Literacy is pretty important for students, especially in an age where they’re exposed to various forms of media, a lot of which is very skewed in one way or the other, and usually takes a reductionist viewpoint of the issues it addresses. I try to use CML to help students understand the misinformation about mathematics, the nature of mathematics, and challenge stereotypes of who is or isn’t a mathematician (examples: Not all mathematicians are white or Asian, there are Latino and African/African American mathematicians, there are mathematicians from faith backgrounds, mathematics isn’t just about calculations, etc.).

Two additional respondents also acknowledged the benefits of CML but felt challenged by the additional work needed to integrate it into the curriculum. A high school science teacher shared:

When I took the Critical Media Literacy class, it felt like it was more geared towards the humanities and not necessarily for the sciences. While it would be great to come up with lessons that connect chemistry and critical media literacy, it is immensely time-consuming when I can’t find other people to brainstorm with.

Another secondary science teacher also felt CML was important but struggled to find ways to integrate it into the classroom:

It was a great shared learning space and I got a ton of inspiration from taking the class; however, it has been difficult to use CML when direct instruction does focus on the explanation of scientific concepts. That’s not to say it is impossible, it just does take one more step of planning and student buy in.

Researchers in Canada found that after teaching CML concepts and skills in a Language Arts methods course, their preservice teachers felt enthusiastic about teaching media literacy, but challenged when designing CML lessons ( Robertson & Hughes, 2011 , p. 51). Robertson and Hughes (2011) list five reasons why teaching CML was so challenging for their students: (1) when these preservice teachers were K-12 students, most did not experience CML lessons; (2) the majority of their mentor teachers did not teach CML or know much about it; (3) critical analysis practices are not easy; (4) few resources are available; and (5) some schools have little technology and technical support. These are many of the same challenges that our teachers reported.

Intent and Importance of Incorporating Critical Media Literacy

Numerous teachers wrote about how meaningful, vital, transformative, and important this class was for them. A high school science teacher shared that the critical media literacy (CML) class, “was transformative! I’m still working on ways to fully integrate what I learned, but I have had my students creating media ever since.” A middle school English teacher commented about how the CML class “gave us techniques, projects, lessons that we can incorporate in our classrooms. Teaching students how to be critical of information related through the media is highly important because student[s] gain that critical awareness necessary for a technology-based society!”

A desire to bring more CML into the classroom surfaced throughout many of the qualitative responses. When asked to indicate any additional comments, 16 out of 64 respondents (25%) expressed their intention to integrate concepts related to media literacy or CML. A high school math teacher who wrote about having students create ads to represent data in graphs stated, “I wish I could incorporate more. I’ll keep trying.” A kindergarten teacher commented, “I wish I had more time to engage my students in this topic. As I grow in experience and expertise, I incorporate it more and more. Teaching in urban areas is a challenge but I do find the ideas of the course to be valuable in the classroom.”

The data and voices of these teachers raise practical, theoretical, and policy implications for future work in supporting teachers in adopting a pedagogical approach that can ignite engagement, make learning relevant, and deepen critical thinking with media, technology, and all information. In order for this to happen, teacher education programs need to address some of the challenges and limitations highlighted in the study.

The teachers surveyed reported challenges for implementing critical media literacy (CML) such as limited access to resources, lack of support, and a struggle to understand how to integrate it into the curriculum. This was especially evident for the math and science teachers. CML courses need to help teachers in all content areas rethink the silo approach to separate subject matter instruction and recognize the ways literacy is used in all areas and how information is connected to students’ lives through issues of power, privilege, and pleasure. To help teachers integrate CML into the curriculum, it is important for them to see content and grade-level examples while also receiving ongoing support and resources.

One way to support teachers in various subject matter is to create groups or projects modeled after the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) or the Center X professional development projects. 4 The SHEG is a research and development group that provides free online resources and lesson plans for history teachers to support students in developing historical thinking skills. In a similar way, the Center X projects provide resources, lesson ideas, and professional development to support working teachers and administrators, while also creating curriculum, providing trainings, and engaging in research. The creation of a CML project or research and development group could provide ongoing professional development for new and experienced teachers in order to sustain CML implementation and support the growth of CML as an important field of investigation.

In-service teachers in our survey reported higher rates of integration of CML, perhaps because experienced teachers have figured out issues of classroom management, lesson planning, and how to balance work and life expectations. As a result, they are better situated to build and expand their curricula and teaching practices to bring CML into their classrooms. While creating a site modeled after the SHEG or Center X projects will require a significant investment of time and money, a more immediate and economical way to provide support for preservice teachers could be through integrating CML across various teacher preparation courses, especially in methods classes. This integration would require working with teacher educators to explore the CML theoretical framework and co-construct new practices and curricula for integrating these ideas throughout different content areas.

Despite the challenges reported by our teachers, the data also suggest promising possibilities for CML. While we do not claim causality between their teaching and the CML course, the data provide a window into how our preservice and in-service teachers have supported critical engagement with the information, entertainment, and social media embedded in the lives of students.

The similarities between elementary and secondary teachers suggest that CML can be just as appropriate for lower grades as it is commonly assumed to be for older students. The work in critical literacy by Comber (2013) and Vasquez (2014) offers support for the notion that young children can engage deeply in critical thinking and social justice education. The elementary teachers in our study demonstrate these ideas through the work they have done to engage their young students with media analysis and critical media production from kindergarten on up. While some teachers reported deep levels of critical analysis more often than others, many expressed their belief in the importance of CML and their desire to teach about social justice. Vasquez (2017) reminds us that critical literacy should not be a topic to teach: “Instead it should be looked on as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond. What this means is that critical literacy involves having a critical perspective or way of being” (p. 8). Developing social justice educators who internalize a critical way of looking at the world and questioning systems of power is the project for which CML provides a pragmatic framework and pedagogy.

It is impressive to see the majority of teachers reporting that using CML encourages critical thinking, something more important than ever in the age of fake news and alternative facts. There is hope in the teachers’ voices as they describe the activities they have been doing with their students, the successes they have encountered, and the challenges they have struggled to overcome. The comments about their intentions to teach CML and the importance they attribute to teaching these concepts provide encouragement for teacher educators to embrace CML. More than anything, the data demonstrate the potential for teaching CML in elementary and secondary settings with preservice and in-service teachers and in all content areas, even though some are more challenging than others. The use of media and technology offers opportunities for teachers to build on students’ prior knowledge, create a bridge to connect the outside world with school learning, and provide the raw material to examine everyday experiences of power, marginalization, and resistance.

Simply integrating media into the curriculum is not enough to develop critical literacies given the changing and multiple literacies associated with new digital information and communication technologies and practices. In the contemporary moment, there is a pressing pedagogical need to navigate the increasingly consequential artificial intelligence (AI) systems that collect, collate, process, predict and disseminate information determined by algorithms. Data from the survey suggest that our teachers are teaching more with media than critically analyzing it. Further studies are needed in order to better understand how to develop teachers’ CML frameworks and support more implementation.

Preparing educators to teach CML is not easy, and unfortunately, few institutes of higher education are attempting the challenge. However, it is possible, and in fact, it can be highly rewarding. By listening to the voices of teachers who have taken a CML course, we see the potential. As one high school science teacher commented, “CML changed me, changed my teaching, continues to change my students.”

While information communication technologies are integrating into all aspects of our lives, we are also witnessing increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, out-of-control climate change, and the weaponization of information and media. In order to create a socially just democratic society and sustainable planet, we must have people who can critically read and write the word and the world ( Freire & Macedo, 1987 ). The need for CML has never been greater. A high school English teacher wrote, “there is no literacy without media literacy. There is not critical pedagogy without critical media literacy.” It is our hope that this article serves as a resource to continue exploring the potential that CML offers to transform students, schools, and society.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following educators who helped us design and teach this critical media literacy course: Shani Byard, Peter Carlson, Steven Funk, Antero Garcia, Mark Gomez, Clifford Lee, Elexia Reyes-McGovern, and Martin Romero. We are grateful to Megan Franke for her guidance with the creation of the survey. We also appreciate the assistance of Jarod Kawasaki, Jose-Felipe Martinez, and Brandon McMillan with helping to organize the survey data.

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1. The UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curriculum can be found at the following location.

2. These can be found at the Center for Media Literacy website .

3. See The UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide .

4. The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and the Center X site is at UCLA CENTER X PREPARES & SUPPORTS EDUCATORS .

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Critical Thinking in a World of Fake News. Teaching the Public to Make Good Choices

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Strengthen Media Literacy to Win the Fight Against Misinformation

If the world is going to stop deliberate or unintentional misinformation and its insidious effects, we need to radically expand and accelerate our counterattacks, particularly human-centered solutions focused on improving people's media and information literacy.

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By Kristin M. Lord & Katya Vogt Mar. 18, 2021

The deliberate or unintentional spread of misinformation, despite capturing widespread public attention, remains as rampant as ever, showing up recently in the form of false claims about COVID-19 vaccines , the Capitol riot , and many other topics . This “ infodemic ” is polarizing politics , endangering communities , weakening institutions , and leaving people unsure what to believe or whom to trust . It threatens the foundations of democratic governance , social cohesion , national security , and public health .

Misinformation is a long-term problem that demands long-term, sustainable solutions as well as short-term interventions. We've seen a number of quicker, technological fixes that improve the social media platforms that supply information. Companies like Facebook and Twitter, for example, have adjusted their algorithms or called out problematic content . We've also seen slower, human-centered approaches that make people smarter about the media they demand to access online. Evidence-driven educational programs, for instance, have made people better at discerning the reliability of information sources, distinguishing facts from opinions, resisting emotional manipulation, and being good digital citizens.

It hasn't been enough. If we're to stop misinformation and its insidious effects, we need to radically expand and accelerate our counterattacks. It will take all sectors of society: business, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, philanthropists, researchers, governments, and more. We also need to balance our efforts. For too long, too many resources and debates have focused on changing the technology, not educating people. This emphasis on the supply side of the problem without a similar investment in the demand side may be a less effective use of time and energy.

While technology-centered, self-policing solutions—filtering software, artificial intelligence, modified algorithms, and content labeling—do have the ability to make changes quickly and at scale, they face significant ethical, financial, logistical, and legal constraints.

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For one, social media business models thrive on engagement, which incentivizes emotionally charged and freely flowing content. Tech leaders like Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, hesitate taking action over concerns about free speech and have tried to avoid political debates until pressed . When they do take action, they face scrutiny for an inconsistent approach. Additionally, research shows that some of the most commonly employed methods for combatting misinformation on social media—such as banners that display fact-checks—have little impact on people’s likelihood to believe deliberately misleading news, and some even backfire. And because people often have a deeply held desire to share what they know with others—particularly information that seems threatening or exciting —tech companies can only go so far to regulate content. There is also the challenge of volume. Tech platforms struggle to keep pace with the many forms and producers of disinformation. Stopping them resembles a high-stakes, never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole.

Given these challenges, we need to invest more into human-centered solutions focused on improving people's media and information literacy. They not only demonstrate a much deeper and longer-lasting impact, but also may be easier and cheaper to implement than commonly believed.

Research from the RAND Corporation and others shows media and information literacy improves critical thinking , awareness of media bias , and the desire to consume quality news —all of which help beat back misinformation. Even brief exposure to some training can improve competencies in media literacy, including a better understanding of news credibility or a more robust ability to evaluate biases . Media literacy has a stronger impact than political knowledge on the ability to evaluate the accuracy of political messages, regardless of political opinion. Digital media literacy reduced the perceived accuracy of false news, and training remains effective when delivered in different ways and by different groups .

Media literacy training has lasting impact. A year and a half after adults went through a program from IREX (a nonprofit where the authors work), they continued to be 25 percent more likely to check multiple news sources and 13 percent more likely to discern between disinformation and a piece of objective reporting. In Jordan and Serbia, participants in IREX's training also improved their media literacy skills up to 97 percent . 

Media literacy programs can also be affordably and extensively delivered through schools. Finland and Sweden incorporated media literacy into their education systems decades ago with positive results, and Ukraine is beginning to do the same . In Britain, youth who had training in schools showed an improvement in media literacy skills .

Critics may say that improving people's media literacy and other human-centered solutions are resource-intensive and will not address the problem quickly enough or at sufficient scale. These are real challenges, but the long-term efficacy of such programs is exactly what is needed in the never-ending battle with misinformation. We need to invest more in them while continuing to pursue technology solutions, or we may never create and sustain the accurately informed citizenry that healthy democracies demand.

The effort will require all sectors of societies across the globe collaborating to fully understand and solve the problem. We need nonprofits and advocacy organizations to raise the alarm with the people they serve. We need philanthropists to step up with funding to scale solutions. We need more researchers to provide evidence-based answers to the full scope of the problem and the efficacy of fixes. We need governments to integrate media literacy standards into schools and incentivize training. We need tech companies to do more than tweak their platforms—they need to invest in educating the people who use them, too.

The tools to blunt the power of misinformation are in our hands, but we have to work smarter and faster or risk losing an ever-intensifying fight. Much learning, coalition-building, scaling, and communication remains to be done to " emerge from information bankruptcy ." Solutions are complex but within our reach. And the consequences of inaction are dire: the increasingly severe and invasive destabilization of our societies and daily lives as lies trample the truth.

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• Open access
• Published: 26 April 2023

Fake news detection on social media: the predictive role of university students’ critical thinking dispositions and new media literacy

• Ali Orhan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1234-3919 1  

Smart Learning Environments volume  10 , Article number:  29 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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This study aimed to investigate the predictive role of critical thinking dispositions and new media literacies on the ability to detect fake news on social media. The sample group of the study consisted of 157 university students. Sosu Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale, New Media Literacy Scale, and fake news detection task were employed to gather the data. It was found that university students possess high critical thinking dispositions and new media literacies as well as high fake news detection abilities and there is a positive and moderate relationship among these variables. Also, this study revealed that critical thinking dispositions and new media literacies significantly predicted university students’ abilities to detect fake news on social media and they together explained 18% of the total variance on fake news detection. Besides, university students’ critical thinking dispositions presented a larger effect on their abilities to detect fake news than new media literacies.

Introduction

With the great enhancement of the internet, social media (SM) has become one of the most widely used sources of information today and a great number of people use SM platforms to learn news (Aldwairi & Alwahedi, 2018 ). There is a great pile of information on the internet and this can be disseminated very easily and quickly on SM. We can learn breaking news quicker on SM than any other conventional means of communication. However, there is a great problem here. Although SM provides a space for news to spread at an impressive rate, it can also become a hotbed of misinformation (Gaozhao, 2021 ; Shu et al., 2017 ). Instead of reaching true and unbiased news, people are bombarded with a great number of fake news (FN) on SM. As a recent example, there has been a rash of digital FN about COVID-19 on SM resulting in undesired health, social, and cultural consequences (Kouzy et al., 2020 ). Also, FN had an undeniable role in the Brexit Referendum and in the USA Presidential Election in 2016 (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017 ; Bastos & Mercea, 2019 ).

FN can be briefly defined as inaccurate or fictitious content which is released or disseminated as real information although it is not (Gaozhao, 2021 ). FN—in other words, fabricated news—can be easily disseminated in the form of real news either on SM or through other conventional means of communication (Molina et al., 2021 ) and it does not have any objective evidence to show the authenticity of the information which it conveys (Pennycook & Rand, 2021 ). FN attracts a lot more attention and spreads more quickly than real news and it mostly includes emotionally charged language (Vosoughi et al., 2018 ). Although FN phenomenon has hundreds of years of history (Tandoc et al., 2018 ) and the ability to detect it has been prized for a long time (Beiler & Kiesler, 2018 ; Burkhardt, 2017 ), its reach and mostly deleterious effect have elevated significantly today because of a wide range of SM platforms (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017 ). FN is undesirable because it can influence people in a psychological and social way by distorting their beliefs resulting in misinformed and wrong decisions (Zimmermann & Kohring, 2020 ). Also, FN does not only negatively affect individuals, but it is also harmful to society in many ways. It can have many political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. People can lose their trust in the media (Vaccari & Chadwick, 2020 ) and balance of the news ecosystem can be ruined because of the increasing spread of FN (Shu et al., 2017 ).

Therefore, although it is vital to ascertain news veracity on SM where information is easily accessible, it is not easy to do this because of the nature of SM (Hernon, 1995 ). SM users can have broad access to produce information without any filtering or editorial judgement (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017 ) and most of the content on SM is spontaneous and unprofessional (Robinson & DeShano, 2011 ). Besides, the great volume of information on SM makes it impossible to check the authenticity of the news on SM (Pennycook & Rand, 2019 ; Zhang & Ghorbani, 2020 ). Also, people tend to share the information easily and repeatedly with others when they believe FN is true which proliferates the spread of FN (Oh et al., 2018 ) and they can unwittingly contribute to the dissemination of FN produced by others on SM.

Although producing and consuming FN are clearly two different behaviors, the difference between them has become blurred because of the characteristics of the SM platforms. Individuals can easily create, share, and consume information on SM within a few seconds from anywhere and at any time. Therefore, individuals can easily change their roles from FN producers to consumers, or vice versa (Kim et al., 2021 ). Also, they can do this intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, SM is a great place for FN to become extremely influential and spread extremely fast. As SM provides a space for the proliferation of FN and a lot of people rely on SM platforms as the main source of information (Lazer et al., 2018 ), educating people to fight against FN and equipping them with the necessary tools to identify FN are crucial (Zhang & Ghorbani, 2020 ). Previous literature indicates that critical thinking (CT) and new media literacy (NML) are two of the most essential tools that can be used by individuals to protect themselves against FN on SM.

Critical thinking and fake news detection

CT is a functional, reflective, and logical thinking process employed by individuals before deciding what to do or what to believe (Ennis, 2000 ). In other words, CT can help individuals to make true and reasonable decisions about their actions or on the accuracy of information. CT leads to more accurate and systematic processing of ideas, arguments, and information (Ruggerio, 1988 ) in which the quality and accuracy of them are examined and evaluated (Lewis & Smith, 1993 ) and after this careful and logical examination process, they decide to believe or support them. Therefore, it can be said that CT works as armor that protects individuals against fake information (Epstein & Kernberger, 2012 ). An adequate critical thinker is “habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, fair-minded in evaluation, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, and focused in inquiry” (Facione, 1990 , p. 2). For adequate critical thinkers, all assumptions are questionable and divergent ideas are always welcomed. They are always willing to inquire and this inquiry is not affected by their emotions, heuristics, or prejudices, and is not biased in favor of a particular outcome (Kurfiss, 1988 ).

Therefore, CT can be seen as an effective weapon to combat FN (Bronstein et al., 2019 ; Wilson, 2018 ). CT is a thinking process employed by individuals to perceive whether the information is real or fake (Paul, 1990 ). Good critical thinkers—in other words, people who have high CT skills and dispositions at the same time—tend to examine and evaluate the news they encounter on SM to see if it is accurate and real (Lewis & Smith, 1993 ). They evaluate the sensibility and accuracy of given news, examine the source of it, and look for sound evidence to trust in the accuracy of it (Mason, 2008 ). Based on the results of this careful examination process, they can decide whether to share this news with others or not. Therefore, CT can also be seen as an important barrier against the proliferation of FN on SM. While individuals lacking CT tend to share the information easily and repeatedly with others without checking the accuracy of it resulting in the quick spread of FN (Oh et al., 2018 ), individuals with high CT skills and dispositions tend to evaluate the content and the source of it before sharing. After this careful examination based on sound evidence instead of heuristics and emotions (Kahneman, 2011 ), they can decide not to share it with others if they decide that it is fake and misleading or it does not have strong arguments, and hence, they can break the chain and decelerate the dissemination of FN on SM. Therefore, it can be said that adequate critical thinkers not only do not fall into traps of FN but also they do not contribute to the dissemination of FN produced by others on SM.

Previous literature has reported some empirical evidence indicating CT has a positive effect on detecting FN on SM. In their study with 1129 participants, Escola-Gascon et al. ( 2021 ) found out that CT dispositions significantly predicted the detection of FN. In their experimental study aiming to examine if adding CT recommendations to SM posts can help people to better discriminate true news from FN, Kruijt et al. ( 2022 ) concluded that participants who were exposed to CT recommendations presented better performance to detect FN. Lutzke et al. ( 2019 ) found that participants exposed to guidelines priming CT performed better to detect FN in their experimental study which was carried out to investigate the effectiveness of guidelines priming CT on willingness to trust, like, and share FN.

New media literacy and fake news detection

NML can be seen as a broader term which involves different kinds of literacy like classic (e.g., reading and writing), audiovisual (electronic media), digital, and information literacies. It includes some important process skills like access, analysis, evaluation, critique, production, and participation in media content (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009 ; Lee et al., 2015 ; Zhang et al., 2014 ). The interaction between individuals and media content can be divided into two categories, namely, consuming and prosuming (Toffler, 1981 ). Also, the term of literacy can be divided into two categories which are functional literacies and critical literacies (Buckingham, 2003 ). While functional literacies, which are related to skills and knowledge, refer to individuals’ capability of knowing how, critical literacies are about individuals’ capability of meaning-making and evaluating the credibility, accuracy, and usefulness of the message (Buckingham, 2003 ). Based on these two categorizations, a conceptual framework for NML is proposed by Chen et al. ( 2011 ). This framework proposes that NML includes functional consuming, functional prosuming, critical consuming, and critical prosuming literacies. While functional consuming literacy is about individuals’ capability of gaining access to created new media content and understanding the message it conveys, critical consuming literacy refers to individuals’ capability of investigating the media content in terms of different perspectives such as cultural, political, social, and economic (Chen et al., 2011 ). Also, while functional prosuming literacy refers to the ability to create media content, critical prosuming literacy involves the contextual interpretation of the media content by individuals during their activities on media (Chen et al., 2011 ).

Individuals with high NML are aware of the way the messages are created, disseminated, and commercialized all over the world (Thoman & Jolls, 2004 ) and can use different media platforms consciously, distinguish and evaluate different media content, investigate the media types, its effects, and the messages they convey in a critical way, and (re)produce new media content (Kellner & Share, 2007 ). In other words, new media literate individuals can critically access, decode, understand, and analyze the messages which various kinds of media content convey (Leaning, 2017 ; Potter, 2010 ) and they can make independent judgements about the veracity of media content (Buckingham, 2015 ; Leaning, 2017 ). Therefore, we can say that high NML provides the necessary skills for individuals to actively investigate, evaluate, and analyze the media content and its underlying messages instead of passively consuming the media content and accepting the veracity of the conveying messages which can include potentially misinformation and disinformation without thinking, and hence, it can protect individuals from the negative effects of new media platforms (Hobbs, 2017 ). New media literate individuals are capable of investigating and evaluating the credibility of the information or news in a critical way, verifying the authenticity of them, and using them ethically. In short, NML increases the possibility that individuals take a critical standpoint toward FN (Kim et al., 2021 ) and it has an important effect on the degree of consumption and dissemination of FN on SM (Staksrud et al., 2013 ). Therefore, new media literate individuals can not only protect themselves against the consuming FN but also they are possibly going to be unwilling to share the news without being sure about the accuracy of it, and hence, they are going to have a proactive role in stopping the spread of FN (Parikh & Atrey, 2018 ).

Previous research has provided some empirical evidence indicating NML has a positive effect on the ability to detect FN on SM. In their study aiming to investigate the relation between students’ level of new media literacies and their ability to discern FN, Luo et al. ( 2022 ) concluded that NML and FN detection performance are significantly related to each other. In her experimental study aiming to investigate the effectiveness of media and information literacy on FN detection, Adjin-Tettey ( 2022 ) found that media and information literacy trained participants were more likely to detect FN and less likely to share it. Similarly, Al Zou’bi ( 2022 ) carried out an experimental study to investigate the effectiveness of media and information literacy on FN detection and concluded that media and information literate students presented better abilities to detect FN. Moore and Hancock ( 2022 ) also reported similar results in their experimental study. Besides, Guess et al. ( 2020 ) concluded that participants who received media literacy education were more successful in FN detection. Also, Lee et al. ( 2022 ) concluded that NML possesses an important role on mitigating the FN problem in their study which was carried out to investigate the effectiveness of NML on perception of FN, media trust, and fact-checking motivation.

The current study

FN is an important problem and it can pollute the public sphere and harm democracy, journalism, and freedom of expression (Pogue, 2017 ). Indeed, it is listed as one of the most important threats to society by the World Economic Forum (Del Vicario et al., 2016 ). Therefore, equipping individuals with the necessary tools to identify FN is crucial (Zhang & Ghorbani, 2020 ). However, the usage of these necessary tools, especially cognitive ones, to combat FN is not investigated sufficiently (Machete & Turpin, 2020 ; Wu et al., 2022 ) and there is a clear need for other studies investigating what can be done and how these tools can be used to combat against FN (Au et al., 2021 ). Previous literature has showed that CT and NML, which can also be seen as a survival kit for this century, are two of the most essential cognitive tools that can be used by individuals to protect themselves against FN on SM. Although there is a well-established theoretical base regarding the positive effect of CT and NML on FN detection, there is not enough empirical evidence indicating the positive role of CT and NML in fighting against FN in the literature (Xiao et al., 2021 ; Zanuddin & Shin, 2020 ). Also, most of the previous research regarding the positive effect of CT and NML on FN detection consists of correlational and experimental studies and there are not enough studies examining the predictive role of CT and NML on FN detection, and hence, empirical evidence regarding the predictive power of these variables is limited. Therefore, we can say that examining the predictive power of CT and NML on FN detection is a promising area of research that may be useful to shed light on what extent these two variables are effective on FN detection on SM. The dearth of research on the predictive role of CT and NML on FN detection provides a sufficient reason for this study aiming to examine the effectiveness of CT and NML on FN detection. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML of university students on their ability to detect FN on SM. To this end, the following questions were sought:

What are university students’ levels of CT dispositions and NML?

Are university students’ Sosu Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (CTDS) and New Media Literacy Scale (NMLS) scores significant predictors of their ability to detect FN?

In this non-experimental quantitative study, a cross-sectional survey design was used. University students’ ability to detect FN was determined as the dependent variable of the study and their scores on the CTDS and NMLS were determined as predictor variables.

Study group

This study was conducted with 157 university students (66 females, 91 males) studying in a state university in Turkey in the academic year of 2022–2023. The students were recruited on a voluntary basis. The mean age of them was 18.96 (SD = 1.00) and their age ranged between 17 and 24. All of the students were in their one-year English preparatory year which is compulsory for them before starting their education in their departments. They are learning only English in this year. The majority of students’ mothers graduated from high school (31.8%) and primary school (29.3%) while most of their fathers are high school (38.2%) and university (25.5%) graduates. A-priori power analysis was conducted using G*Power 3 by Faul et al. ( 2007 ) for linear multiple regression analysis (alpha = 0.05; power = 0.95; two predictors) and it showed that the minimal sample size should be 107 to detect a medium effect size (f 2  = 0.15). So, it can be said that the sample size of 157 was adequate.

Data collection tools

Sosu critical thinking dispositions scale (ctds).

The CTDS developed by Sosu ( 2013 ) and adapted into Turkish by Orhan ( 2023 ) was used to measure the university students’ CT dispositions. The CTDS has 11 items and two sub-dimensions, namely, critical openness (7 items) and reflective skepticism (4 items). Turkish adaptation study with two independent samples indicated that the Turkish version of CTDS has the same factor structure as the original one. The reliability coefficient of the CTDS was found to be 0.92 for sample 1 and 0.94 for sample 2 in the adaptation study. In this study, the reliability coefficient was calculated as 0.80 for the total scale.

New Media Literacy Scale (NMLS)

The NMLS developed by Koç and Barut ( 2016 ) was used to determine students’ new media literacies. The NMLS has 35 items and four sub-dimensions, namely, functional consumption (7 items), critical consumption (11 items), functional prosumption (7 items), and critical prosumption (10 items). The reliability coefficients of the sub-dimensions ranged between 0.85 and 0.93 while it was calculated as 0.95 for the total scale. In this study, the reliability coefficient was 0.92 for the total scale.

• Ability to detect fake news

The university students’ ability to detect FN on SM was measured using a FN detection task created by the researcher based on the previous study of Preston et al. ( 2021 ). The FN detection task includes six news items, three of them present real news content while three of them include FN content. The FN items include topics related to a claim that Red Cross has ceased its activities in Ukraine (fake), a claim that NASA has stopped its research on oceans (fake), and a claim that Starbucks no more accepts payment by cash money (fake). The first real news item claims that Dwayne Johnson has become the highest-paid actor for the second consecutive year. The second real news item says that an electric bus produced by KARSAN (a Turkish company) started to provide public transportation services in Norway. The third real news indicates that Turkey has become the country that produces the most figs in 2020 with 320 thousand tons of production according to 2020 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Two independent and impartial fact-checking websites ( www.dogrula.org and www.teyit.org ) were used to obtain information related to fake and real news items. These two websites are really popular in Turkey and free to use as a fact-checking resource.

Four main components, namely, news sharing source, original news item source, content level, and author argument were considered while developing the mock Facebook post items to increase the possibility for the students to evaluate levels of objectivity, professionalism, argument strength, and trustworthiness in the items. The news items look like a typical Facebook news post including likes, comments, and shares in which an article is shared by an organization related to its content (see Fig.  1 ). For example, the Facebook page named “Sinema & Sinema” is sharing an article from “boxofficeturkiye.com”. The number of comments, likes, and shares are similar between fake and real news items groups in order not to affect students’ choices.

Examples of FN items (on the left) and real news items (on the right)

For the first component, more objective content names (e.g. Sinema & Sinema) were used for the real news to influence impressions of professionalism and objectivity while more subjective-sounding content names (e.g. bilim günlüğü) were chosen for FN. Also, for the second component, more objective content suggesting website names were chosen for the real news items (e.g. boxofficeturkiye.com) while FN items included websites suggestive of more subjective content (e.g. savunmatr.com). For the third component, FN items presented short information written in a subjective style and without using any credible source to suggest low trustworthiness. For the fourth component, FN items included author arguments written using emotive language and without references to reliable sources suggesting subjectivity and low levels of argument strength, professionalism, and trustworthiness. On the other hand, I employed the opposite strategies like references to reliable sources and non-emotive language for the real news items.

After preparing the six news items, students were asked to critically analyze each of them and answer four questions prefaced with the text “to what extent do you agree with the following statement”. The first question is “the author and shared article are objective” and it aims to evaluate the level of objectivity. The second question which aims to evaluate professionalism is “the article seems to be produced by a professional”. The third question designed to evaluate the argument strength is “the article presents a strong argument”. The last question is “this source of information is credible and trustworthy” and it aims to evaluate the trustworthiness. Students can answer the questions via 5 point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Students’ responses to the FN are reverse-coded. Scores on the FN detection task can range from 24 to 120 with a midpoint of 60. Higher scores indicate a stronger ability to detect FN while lower scores indicate a weaker ability to detect FN. The reliability coefficient calculated for the FN detection task was 0.84 in this study.

Data collection

Following the ethical committee approval from ZBEU, the data were gathered in the fall term of 2021–2022 academic year. Privacy and confidentiality issues and the aim of the study were shared with all students and they were informed about their right to withdraw from the study if they want. Students completed the instruments in about 30 min.

Data analysis

First, all variables were investigated to see whether they had any missing data and it was seen that they had no missing data. After that, the data were investigated in terms of normality and Skewness and Kurtosis values indicated that the data presented normal distribution for each variable (see Table 1 ). Then, possible multivariate outliers and outliers per variable were checked with Mahalanobis Distance scores and Z transformation values. These scores revealed that the data did not have any influential outliers which should be excluded. Pearson correlation, CI, VIF, and tolerance values were examined to check if there is a high correlation among the variables and it was seen that there is no high correlation. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple linear regression with enter method were conducted using SPSS 20 statistical software to analyze the data.

As shown in Table 1 , university students presented high CT dispositions ( \(\overline{{\text{X}}}\)  = 3.89) and new media literacies ( \(\overline{{\text{X}}}\)  = 3.83). Also, their mean score for the FN detection task is 76.84. As the scores of the FN detection task can range between 24 and 120 with a midpoint of 60, we can say that the students have higher scores than the midpoint indicating that they have high abilities to detect FN.

As shown in Table 2 , university students’ CT dispositions ( r  = 0.399) and new media literacies ( r  = 0.303) have a moderate and positive relationship with their abilities to detect FN. Also, there is a positive and moderate relationship between university students’ CT dispositions and new media literacies ( r  = 0.417).

As it can be seen in Table 3 , multiple linear regression analysis results indicated that university students’ CT dispositions (β = 0.329, t (157)= 4.106, p < 0.05) and new media literacies (β = 0.165, t (157)= 2.062, p < 0.05) significantly predicted their abilities to detect FN on SM (R = 0.426, R 2  = 0.181, p < 0.01). One-way ANOVA test results showed that the established regression model was significant (F (2,156)  = 17.065, p < 0.01). Students’ CT dispositions and new media literacies together explained 18% of the total variance on their abilities to detect FN on SM. Besides, university students’ CT dispositions (β = 0.329) presented a larger effect on their abilities to detect FN than new media literacies (β = 0.165).

This study aimed to investigate the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML of university students on their ability to detect FN on SM. It was seen that university students presented high CT dispositions and NML as well as high abilities to detect FN. Another result obtained in the study revealed that CT dispositions and NML of university students were positively and moderately related to their abilities to detect FN. Also, a positive and moderate relationship between university students’ CT dispositions and NML was found.

This study also revealed that university students’ CT dispositions and new media literacies significantly predicted their abilities to detect FN on SM. Students’ CT dispositions and new media literacies together explained 18% of the total variance on their abilities to detect FN on SM. Previous literature revealed similar results regarding the positive effect of CT dispositions (Escola-Gascon et al., 2021 ; Kruijt et al., 2022 ; Lutzke et al., 2019 ) and NML (Adjin-Tettey, 2022 ; Al Zou’bi, 2022 ; Guess et al., 2020 ; Lee et al., 2022 ; Luo et al., 2022 ; Moore & Hancock, 2022 ) on FN detection on SM. Therefore, we can say that previous literature confirmed the results of this study.

Individuals with high CT skills and dispositions do not make instant decisions about their behaviors or the accuracy of information without employing a systematic and logical thinking process in which they examine and evaluate the quality and accuracy of ideas, arguments, and information (Lewis & Smith, 1993 ; Ruggerio, 1988 ). They acquire the most accurate information about their environment and can make the best decision about their actions thanks to CT. Individuals wear CT as armor and protect themselves against fake information (Epstein & Kernberger, 2012 ). Therefore, we can say that CT is a vital skill for individuals in their daily life and it is even more important during the time they spend on SM where people have been bombarded with a great number of FN. An adequate critical thinker tends to examine and evaluate the accuracy of the news they encounter on SM (Lewis & Smith, 1993 ) and they are unwilling to share this news with others until they make sure about the sensibility and accuracy of it (Mason, 2008 ). Therefore, CT not only helps individuals not to fall into traps of FN but also works as a barrier against the dissemination of FN produced by others on SM which makes CT an important and effective weapon to combat FN (Bronstein et al., 2019 ; Wilson, 2018 ). Indeed, Machete and Turpin ( 2020 ) concluded that previous relevant literature indicated that CT is an important skill to identify FN in their systematic review study aiming to present the current state of the literature on the usage of CT to detect FN.

Individuals with high NML possess the ability to access, decode, understand, and analyze the messages which different kinds of media content convey (Leaning, 2017 ; Potter, 2010 ). They can also make independent judgements about the veracity of these media content (Buckingham, 2015 ; Leaning, 2017 ). New media literate individuals tend to employ an active process in which they investigate, evaluate, and analyze the media content and its underlying messages instead of passively consuming it because they are aware of the way the media content is created, commercialized, and disseminated all over the world (Thoman & Jolls, 2004 ) and they know that they can include potentially misinformation and disinformation. Therefore, NML equips individuals with the necessary skills to investigate and evaluate the credibility of the information or news and its source, verify the authenticity of them, and use them ethically. Thanks to NML, individuals take a critical standpoint toward FN (Kim et al., 2021 ) and it decreases the possibility of consumption and dissemination of FN on SM (Staksrud et al., 2013 ).

Therefore, we can say that the results of this study indicating CT dispositions and NML were significant predictors of university students’ abilities to detect FN coincide with the theoretical background and the results of previous research. Besides, university students’ CT dispositions presented a larger effect on their abilities to detect FN than new media literacies. This finding shows that CT dispositions are a much more powerful weapon in fighting against FN than NML. CT dispositions equip individuals with the necessary skills to examine and evaluate the quality and accuracy of ideas, claims, and judgments as well as of their source. Also, individuals with high CT dispositions are open to new ideas and they are willing to modify their ideas and arguments when a piece of convincing evidence appears. Therefore, individuals with high CT dispositions are skeptical of any information they encounter in their daily life and they habitually tend to evaluate the veracity of information itself as well as the source of this information. On the other hand, NML is not only about consuming but also producing media content. New media literate individuals are capable of consuming media content in a critical way. They have the necessary skills to actively evaluate the credibility, accuracy, and usefulness of the media content and they can investigate it in terms of different perspectives such as cultural, political, social, and economic. Also, NML is about the capability of gaining access to created new media content, understanding the message it conveys, and (re)producing new media content. They can also use different media platforms consciously, distinguish different media content, and investigate the media types. Correspondingly, we can say that consuming literacies are directly related to FN detection while producing skills have an indirect relation with FN detection ability. On the other hand, CT dispositions are directly related to abilities to detect FN. Therefore, we can say that the result regarding CT dispositions are more effective to combat FN can be explained by this.

In short, this study showed that CT dispositions and NML were significant predictors of university students’ abilities to detect FN. This result which is confirmed by previous research shows the important role of CT dispositions and NML to combat FN which is one of the most important threats to society in today’s world (Del Vicario et al., 2016 ) and can damage democracy, journalism, and freedom of expression (Pogue, 2017 ). We can say that individuals possessing high CT dispositions and NML are more competent to combat FN. They can not only protect themselves against FN on SM but also do not contribute to the dissemination of FN by preferring not to share them with other people. Consequently, CT dispositions and NML should be implemented during the effort of fighting against FN on SM. CT dispositions (Kennedy et al., 1991 ; Lewis & Smith, 1993 ) and NML (Buckingham, 2003 ; Hobbs & Jensen, 2009 ) are teachable skills through appropriate education, and hence, enhancing individuals’ CT dispositions and NML should be included among the most important aims of educational systems because they do not only positively contribute to individuals’ daily and school life (Halpern, 2003 ; Orhan, 2022a , 2022b ; Paul & Elder, 2001 ) but also work as important barriers against the consumption and dissemination of FN on SM. Therefore, we can say that enhancing individuals’ CT dispositions and NML would be a good idea to equip them with the necessary skills that are useful in the fight against FN on SM. It can be said that this study has significantly contributed to the literature by presenting additional evidence regarding the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML on the ability to detect FN on SM because previous literature lacks enough evidence indicating the predictive roles of these two variables (Xiao et al., 2021 ; Zanuddin & Shin, 2020 ). Also, this study differs from the previous studies because it investigated the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML on FN detection comparatively and showed that CT dispositions are a more powerful weapon in fighting against FN than NML.

Limitations and implications for further research

This study has several limitations although it provides important results regarding the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML on FN detection. First, the study group can be shown as a limitation because this study was conducted with a study group consisting of only university students. Therefore, similar studies can be conducted with other sample groups consisting of students from various educational levels, especially high school because high school students spend most of their time on SM. Second, data collection tools can be shown as another limitation of the study because only self-report quantitative tools were employed to gather the data for this study and these tools can be influenced by social desirability. Therefore, further studies using qualitative or mixed methods can be conducted to better understand the predictive role of CT dispositions and NML on FN detection. Third, several other factors like students’ level of media knowledge may affect their ability to detect FN on SM. However, these factors were not taken into account in this study and this can be shown as the third limitation of the study.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Critical thinking

• New media literacy
• Social media

Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale

New Media Literacy Scale

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Orhan, A. Fake news detection on social media: the predictive role of university students’ critical thinking dispositions and new media literacy. Smart Learn. Environ. 10 , 29 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00248-8

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• Critical thinking dispositions
• University students

• What is Fake News?
• Why is it Important?
• Strategies for Spotting Fake News
• Resources to Help Identify Fake News
• Critical Thinking About Data
• Library Resources for Authoritative Content
• Resources for the Classroom

Importance of Free Press

The right to free speech and freedom of expression is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The Bill of Rights , Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution

This means much of what is characterized as "Fake News" is not going away any time soon. It is our responsibility to be conscientious information consumers, able to analyze and identify real and fake news and everything in between.

Real World Consequences

While freedom of speech is a cornerstone in the foundation of the United States, fake news can spread and not just misinform people but inspire people to act violently. Below are some recent examples of consequences of fake news.

Pizzagate was a 2016 conspiracy theory that alleged that high-ranking Democrats ran a child-trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant (Comet Ping Pong) in Washington, D.C. Edgar Maddison Welch acted upon this misinformation, went to self-investigate at the restaurant, and fired rifle shots inside of Comet Ping Pong. Despite being debunked , Comet Ping Pong continues to be the focus of harassment. In January 2019, it suffered an arson attack when a suspect started a fire in one of its backrooms.

The Fawnbrook Case - Twin Falls, Idaho

A five-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. Three boys - ages 7, 10, and 14 - were charged. Ultra-conservative and conspiracy websites falsely reported that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees who gang raped the girl at knife-point.  The anti-refugee story was picked up by a political activist to further her agenda against Muslims despite coverage by the local paper  (and later, The New York Times ) debunking the claims. Read more at Columbia Journalism Review .

Sandy Hook School Shooting / Alex Jones

In December 2012, 20 children and 6 adults were killed by an active shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Alex Jones, a radio host, conspiracy theorist, and owner of InfoWars.com, propagated the theory that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax perpetrated by opponents of the Second Amendment. In 2018, several families of Sandy Hook victims sued Jones for defamation, stating they had been harassed, stalked, and threatened. This case is still in the courts but most recently, Jones was ordered to undergo a sworn deposition and  turn over emails . 

Social Media and the Spreading of Fake News

“Age is also a factor in the way people view the role of social media. Younger social media news consumers are more likely to say it has impacted their learning for the better . About half of social media news consumers ages 18 to 29 (48%) say news on social media makes them better informed , compared with 37% of those 30 to 49, 28% of those 50 to 64, and 27% of those 65 and older.” 18-29 year olds who consume news via social media largely get it from SnapChat (75%), Reddit (51%), and Instagram (51%) .

Source: Pew Research Center " News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2018 "

A 2016 article in the New York Times charts how one unsubstantiated tweet went viral in less than 24 hours, even garnering the attention of President-Elect Donald Trump. It details just how hard it is to fight the misinformation with the truth once it has spread widely. Even after the source of the initial tweet acknowledged that he could be wrong, the fake news continued to spread.

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• Last Updated: Aug 16, 2023 2:30 PM
• URL: https://libguides.rockhurst.edu/fakenews

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Ways to improve your critical thinking

Posted: March 26, 2024 | Last updated: April 26, 2024

Critical thinking is an essential skill for anyone who wishes to be successful in business. It is what allows us to analyze information properly to find appropriate solutions to problems. But it is also important to think critically in every day life; it helps us to filter out fake news, for example.

While most of us have a certain level of critical thinking capacity, there is often room for improvement. Check out this gallery for some tips on how to improve your critical thinking.

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Understand the concept of critical thinking

Before you set about trying to build those critical thinking skills, it is important to first understand what exactly critical thinking is. Put simply, it is the ability to think about ideas and concepts in a critical way.

It is the difference between accepting what you're told at face value and asking questions such as why you're being told that and what is the motivation of the speaker.

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Ask questions

It follows, then, that when learning to think critically it is important to ask questions. When you next read a report or listen to a presentation, try and ask as many questions as you can.

Although you run the risk of winding up the presenter, asking questions is in everyone's interest because it can help to expose weaknesses in logic and pave the way for a better solution to a problem.

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Question yourself

In addition to asking questions about the information in front of you, it is important also to question your own thoughts and actions on a regular basis.

Questioning yourself will help you identify behaviors that are unhelpful or self-defeating. All too often we continue with a certain behavior because it seems right, when in fact it is making things worse.

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Pay attention to all incoming information

It is paramount that you pay attention to all information coming your way, whether or not it comes from a source or person you agree with.

People without critical thinking skills tend to tune out information that they don't want to hear, when in fact people we don't like nearly always have something useful to say.

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Develop foresight

Good critical thinking always involves an element of foresight. Successful critical thinkers are able to use the information available to them to predict what will happen in the future.

However, foresight is not about clairvoyants and tarot cards. Instead it is about carefully considering all the possible consequences of a certain action.

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Reduce time-wasting

Critical thinking, like anything else, takes practice. It is therefore a good idea to rid your life of time-wasting activities, such as Netflix bingeing, so you have more time to practice.

That does not mean to say you shouldn't relax, however. In fact, the brain needs downtime in order to develop. Try and go for something more stimulating, though, like reading a book.

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Plan your day

The more you practice critical thinking, the more easily it will come. In the beginning, however, it takes time. It is therefore important to maximize your time by planning carefully.

Prioritize your tasks and don't bite off more than you can chew. Make sure that you are allowing yourself enough time to really focus on each of your projects and consider them critically.

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Practice critical thinking in your daily life

Do not limit your critical thinking practice to office hours. While being able to think critically is a must if you want to be successful in business, it is also an important life skill in everyday life.

Next time you are choosing a book to read or watching the news, ask yourself what you want to gain from the book, or why that newsreader is emphasizing a particular story.

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Keep a thought journal

Try to keep a record of difficult situations that arise and how you handle them. Writing down your thoughts on such situations will help you to reflect better on your own actions.

It may not be easy at first, but laying bare your reactions to a difficult situation will help you to identify and eliminate destructive behaviors and therefore solve problems more efficiently.

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Check your ego

Having a big head can inhibit critical thinking since it makes it difficult to be objective when assessing a situation. However, being too altruistic doesn't help either.

Try to assign the same level of importance to both your needs and the needs of others. When analyzing a situation, try to focus on people's motivations; why do they want a certain outcome?

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Practice active listening

Active listening involves truly paying attention while someone else is talking, and not letting your eyes glaze over and your mind run off elsewhere.

Not only is it rude not to listen properly when someone is presenting, but you will miss important information and/or ideas that should be submitted to your own mental analysis.

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Evaluate existing evidence

If you have a business problem to solve, the likelihood is that someone before you has solved a very similar if not identical issue. Make the most of past learnings to help you in the present.

Ask yourself whether you have encountered the issue before and, if not, speak to others. Use all the information available to you to find a successful solution.

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Engage a mentor

Like many other things in life, critical thinking can be taught. If the tips in this gallery aren't enough, it may be an idea to find a mentor who can help you on your way to becoming a critical thinking expert.

A mentor may be able to frame critical thinking in such a way that it becomes more accessible and natural to you, and they may have resources for you to practice with.

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Participate in team-building activities

Many team-building activities put on by companies have the aim of improving the critical thinking skills of employees.

Try not to let the thought of your next team-building session fill you with dread. Instead, see it as an opportunity to hone those critical thinking skills and give you a competitive advantage.

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Take on a leadership role

If you're feeling confident, why not throw yourself in the deep end and volunteer to lead a project? Leaders are required to constantly think critically, meaning you'll have loads of practice.

And as we all know, practice makes perfect. So next time your boss asks for a volunteer to head a new initiative, why not take the plunge?

Sources: (Indeed) (Small Businessify)

See also: 30 fun virtual team building ideas

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