Media Literacy

Social Education 82(4), pp. 208–211, 214©2018 National Council for the Social Studies

Misinformation in the
Information Age: What Teachers
Can Do to Support Students
Erica Hodgin and Joe Kahne
I feel like it’s my job to help [my students] do a better job of discriminating[between] what is actual news that would be trustworthy or even less biased[and] other sources. So that’s what I work on for this first year, and hopefully
people will work on for the rest of their lives. Because it’s challenging.
(9th grade Humanities Teacher - Dallas, Texas)
The context that motivates this teacher’s
sentiment is clear. Both youth and adults
struggle to judge the credibility of what
they find online. A recent Pew ResearchCenter study found that 64 percent of
adults believe fake news stories cause agreat deal of confusion, and 23 percent
said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves—sometimes by
mistake and sometimes intentionally.1
Studies also indicate that youth struggle
with this challenge as well. A 2016 study
including middle school, high school,
and college students showed that many
youth cannot tell the difference betweena real news story and “sponsored content”(or an advertisement).2
Teachers, as well as the public, often
look at these findings and decide thatthe problem is one of capacity. “Youthmust learn how to judge the credibilityof online content!” Certainly, this matters but it is an incomplete diagnosis.
Reasoning and analytic capacities are
not enough, especially when it comes to
civic and political information.
One thing that makes learning andthinking about politics different thanmany other subjects is that students(along with adults) often have strong

prior beliefs regarding these topics. Few
students have staked out a position onelectrons prior to learning about them.
The same cannot be said of questions
revolving around abortion policy, or gun
laws, or any number of hot button issues.
And the research is clear. Prior beliefs canbe enormously influential on students’judgements of the credibility of truth
claims related to controversial issues.
For instance, Lodge and Taber foundthat emotions often surface when engaging with socio-political concepts. Theseemotions, in turn, trigger what’s called“hot cognition,” whereby positive andnegative feelings bias subsequent information processing.3 This can lead individuals to seek out evidence that aligns
with their preexisting views (confirmation bias), to attempt to dismiss perspectives that contradict their beliefs (disconfirmation bias), and to consider claims
that align with their views as stronger andmore accurate (prior attitude effect).4
These dynamics, which psychologists
call directional motivation, can limit anindividual’s ability to learn from diverse
viewpoints, especially when it comesto politicized topics. In fact, Redlawsk
found that individuals who encountered
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new information that contradicted theirprior perspective often become morecommitted to their prior beliefs rather
than learning from the new information.5
It’s easy to see how these motivations
can undermine judgments of credibility. Rather than focusing on whether astatement is accurate, youth—like adults—
often focus on whether a statement supports their prior beliefs. These problems
are exacerbated by (a) the growth of theInternet which makes it easier to circulate
such content, (b) increasing partisanship,
which means people are even more
likely to focus on what their “team” says
regardless of whether its accurate, and(c) diminished trust in institutions likethe news media. Given these dynamics, it is fundamentally important that
educators support youth in developinga “healthy level of skepticism” so they
can critically evaluate online information while at the same time identifying
trustworthy sources of news.6
Does Civic Media Literacy
Instruction Make a Difference?
Although the field is new, early researchdemonstrates that civic media literacy
education can be significantly beneficial.
Specifically, drawing on survey data froma nationally representative sample ofyoung people, we found that those withno civic media literacy learning opportunities were just as likely to judge inaccurate posts as accurate as they were posts
that used factually accurate evidence.

Figure. 1

In contrast, youth who received civic
media literacy learning opportunities
were 26 percent more likely to correctly identify an inaccurate politicalpost as inaccurate even when the postaligned with their perspective on theissue (See Figure 1).7 The civic media
literacy learning opportunities that
we found to be impactful were experiences that promoted the importance of
accuracy and that taught skills related tojudging the accuracy of online content.
Therefore, it is critical for schools andcommunity-based educational institutions to integrate civic media literacy
learning opportunities that attend tothese priorities.
Unfortunately, media literacy instruction that supports youth in judging thecredibility of civic and political information found online is lacking. In a 2013
survey, 33 percent of high school age
youth did not report having a single
class session that focused on how to tell
if information found online was trustworthy, and only 16 percent reported
having more than a few class sessions
focused on this topic.8
Furthermore, providing all youth withequitable access to high quality civic

media literacy education must be a central concern of any effort. While theseopportunities are relevant for all school
contexts, they are particularly importantto address in under-resourced schools.
In fact, Hargittai found that Internet
skill level increases correspondinglywith students’ socioeconomic status.9
Moreover, on average, white students,
middle class students, and students inhigher-track classes experience moreclassroom-based, after-school, andinformal civic learning opportunities.10
Thus, educational institutions willneed to put in place a range of supports including improved infrastructure,professional development, curricular
resources, and administrative support
in order to make equitable and highquality opportunities available to allstudents.
What Can Teachers Do?
In what follows, we argue that three educational approaches are paramount. First,
we must help students develop the skills
and capacities to tell what is accurate.
Second, we argue that metacognition isnecessary to become aware of one’s biases
as well as to develop and cultivate a comS e p t e m b e r 2 018
209

mitment to accuracy. Finally, we argue
that ongoing opportunities for students
to practice use of these skills and metacognitive thinking is necessary to instill
habits that can be applied across settingsand contexts. (See Table 1 on page 211)
Taken together, these approaches havethe potential to support young people
in developing the capacity to judge
the accuracy and credibility of online
information, the commitment to accuracy, and the awareness of their biases.
Develop Nuanced Skills and Strategies.
First, educators can help students
develop nuanced skills and strategies
for assessing the accuracy of truth
claims that move beyond hard and fastrules or rote checklists. Such rules andlists misrepresent how complex online
information has become and, therefore,
may make students more susceptible tobelieving misinformation.11 For example,
superficial characteristics such as thepolished “look” of a website or whether
the domain is .com or .org are not reliable features by which to judge the credibility of a website. Instead, educators
can help students understand the complexity that exists and explicitly teach a

range of skills and strategies youth can utilize to navigate theonline information landscape.
McGrew et al., of the Stanford History Education Group(SHEG), call these kind of strategies civic online reasoning—“the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify socialand political information online”12—which includes the ability
to identify who is behind a piece of information, to evaluate
the evidence, and to investigate additional sources. Two key
strategies that SHEG recommends from studying professional
fact-checkers include reading laterally (scan unfamiliar sites
strategically and then leave to search for information about their
credibility elsewhere) and exercising click restraint (become
more discerning consumers of search engine results).13 In short,educators can highlight strategies for choosing between thevarious results of a search, for checking the reliability andcredibility of sources, and for finding background information
on groups making varied claims by looking on a range of sites.
(See Classroom Example #1.)
Classroom Example #1: A 9th grade English teacher named
Ms. Richards in Oakland, California, focused on helping her
students learn to judge the credibility of different online sourcesin preparation for a research project on a contemporary civilrights issue. While reading articles about New York’s controversial “Stop and Frisk” policy, Ms. Richards asked students to usea “Trust-O-Meter” that included critical inquiry questions thatguided students in assessing whether a source was trustworthy,
thereby highlighting factors that made a source questionable
or untrustworthy.* By weighing the strengths and weaknessesof a source, Ms. Richards found that students were better able todetermine the credibility of the online sources as well as reflect
on the complexity of such a task.
* E. Middaugh, "Digital Civic Literacies in Oakland High Schools," EDDA
Research Summary No. 2 (2015a), http://eddaoakland.org/wp-content/
uploads/2015/07/EDDA_Research-Brief_Digital-Literacy_R.pdf.

Reflect on Thought Processes. In addition, young people
may benefit from developing an awareness of the role theirindividual thinking plays in understanding and evaluating
information. They can also reflect on their own personal biases
in relationship to that analysis. Metacognition—the awarenessof one’s learning processes—often takes the form of an internal
dialogue where students are thinking about their own thinking.14 Educators can help make metacognitive processes visible to students in order to surface the kinds of sense-making,self-assessment, and reflection that supports the productive
analysis of online information. (See Classroom Example #2.)
In addition, educators can help students acknowledge how
their own opinions may influence their evaluation of a claim.
By understanding how their prior beliefs may elicit positive

Classroom Example #2: In an 11th grade social studies
classroom in Chicago, Illinois, a teacher, Mr. Dudley, turns on
the projector and shows his students a screencast of his laptop.
Students can see Mr. Dudley type several key terms into a searchengine window, click around a few websites looking for more
information, and check other sites to determine the credibilityof the author and organization. They can also hear him thinkaloud by describing the thoughts and questions that come tomind. After watching, students discuss what they saw Mr. Dudley
doing and what strategies they could use in their own research
project about contemporary issues affecting their community.
By making his process visible, Mr. Dudley surfaces the complexities of online research as well as the skills and stamina needed tonavigate this new information landscape.** J. Kahne, E. Hodgin, and E. Eidman-Aadahl, “Redesigning Civic Education for
the Digital Age: Participatory Politics and the Pursuit of Democratic Engagement,” Theory & Research in Social Education 44 (2016): 1–35.

or negative feelings that bias their processing of information,
students can work to ensure these triggered reactions do noteclipse their efforts to assess the accuracy and credibility ofan argument. For example, teachers can support students todevelop what Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen called “critical loyalty.”15 Those with critical loyalty still hold strong values
and beliefs, but they adopt a critical stance when evaluating an argument—even when it aligns with their beliefs. In
other words, educators can highlight metacognitive processes
that strengthen students’ ability to evaluate the accuracy andcredibility of political claims while at the same time stressing
the need to carefully assess one’s biases and seek out varied
perspectives. (See Classroom Example #3.)
Classroom Example #3: An English teacher named Ms. Moa
worked with 12th grade students in Oakland, California, to writea series of blog posts reflecting on their thinking and learning as they researched a pressing social issue for a capstone
project. After doing some initial research, students paused andchronicled what they found, what sources were reliable and why,
what challenges they faced, what they could do next to deepen
their research, and the extent to which their thinking about theissue changed. Students also read and commented on theirclassmates’ posts in order to offer thoughts and advice. This
process enabled students to learn about the reflective thinkingof their peers.** K. S. Schultz, E. Hodgin, and J. Paraiso, “Blogging as Civic Engagement:
Developing a Sense of Authority and Audience in an Urban Public School
Classroom,” in #youthaction: Becoming Political in the Digital Age, eds. E. Middaugh and B. Kirschner (Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing, 2015),
145–166

Practice, Practice, Practice. Finally, studies suggest that it isimportant for students to be given multiple opportunities to

S o c i a l E d u c at i o n210Table 1. What Teachers Can Do to Help Students Navigate Misinformation in the Information Age
Approaches

Teacher Considerations

Classroom Examples

Develop Nuanced Skills& Strategies•

Guide students in developing nuanced skills
and strategies for assessing the accuracy oftruth claims that move beyond hard and fastrules or rote checklists•

Develop critical inquiry questions withstudents that promote complex analysis ofwhether a source is trustworthy and what
factors make it questionable or untrustworthy

Reflect on Thought
Processes•

Support students to develop an awarenessof the role their individual thinking plays
in understanding and evaluating online
information•

Model and think aloud about the kinds ofthinking involved in judging the credibilityof information or a source••

Help students acknowledge their own
opinions and perspectives and how those may
influence/bias their evaluation of a claim

Ask students to regularly reflect on theirbiases, the accuracy and credibility ofsources, the impact of their biases on their
judgments of credibility, and what they arelearning during a research project•

Give students ongoing and varied practice tointegrate these ways of thinking and theseskills and strategies into their habits, which
can then be applied across settings andcontexts•

Implement a weekly “Do Now” wherestudents research a current event topic
and post a brief response coupled withevidence••

Integrate digital civic media learning
opportunities within the core curriculumin ways that enable students to extend anddeepen their practice of such skills

Integrate regular, often brief, analysis of diverse media messages (including websites,books, videos, social media, etc.) related tocore curricular content with reflections on
student biases

Practice,
Practice,
Practicepractice judging the credibility of online and all forms of
information. For example, in a naturalistic study involving
high school students, Middaugh found that in order for youth
to make fluent and flexible use of the media literacy skills andstrategies they learned, students needed lots of practice.16
Ongoing and varied practice can help students to integrateskills and strategies as well as these ways of thinking into
their habits and to apply these approaches across settingsand contexts. While finding time and space for additional
content is certainly a challenge, many teachers we collaborated
with found success by integrating digital civic media learning
opportunities throughout the core curriculum in ways thatdeepened and extended students’ learning.17
In addition, the quality of such opportunities for practiceis key to consider as well. Mihailidis found that media literacy education approaches that focus solely on skill attainment result in less interest and engagement by students.18
Undoubtedly, offering ongoing learning opportunities that are
relevant, authentic, and related to students’ interests is critical.
Thus, regular classroom routines appear to enable students tobecome more effective and confident in their research skills.
(See Classroom Example #4.)

Classroom Example #4: Ms. Blake, a high school humanities
teacher in Dallas, Texas, integrated regular opportunities for her
students to practice judging the credibility of online information
via a weekly activity at the start of class*. Students responded
to a current event via Twitter using a common hashtag andbriefly shared their perspectives on the issue. Ms. Blake drewon content developed by KQED—a public media station innorthern California—through a program called “Do Now” inwhich students across the country responded to and engaged
in an online discussion centered around a weekly question
about a timely and relevant current event. In their responses, Ms.
Blake asked students to include at least one link to a credible
source they found that backed up their opinions, which meant
students had to conduct some initial research, determine thecredibility and reliability of a variety of sources, and weigh what
they had learned against their ideas in order to succinctly state
their opinions.
* E. Hodgin and J. Kahne, "Judging Credibility in Un-Credible Times: Three
Educational Approaches for the Digital Age," in Fake News: What is it, Why it
is Problematic, and What Educators Can Do about it, ed. W. Journell (New York,
N.Y.: Teachers College Press, in press).

S e p t e m b e r 2 018
211

Supporting Youth to Become
Effective and Thoughtful Civic
Actors
The changes in the online information
landscape, the divisive nature of politicallife, and the growing distrust in democratic institutions have all contributed
to the increasing circulation of misinformation. These dynamics have madeassessing the credibility of information
challenging for youth and adults alike.
While we have much to learn, studies
find that high quality civic media literacy
education can be beneficial.19
In order to integrate such learning
opportunities across the curriculum forall students, teacher education programs,
educational policymakers, funders, districts, and schools will need to invest
in providing teachers with the support,time, space, and resources needed tomake these efforts a priority. At the sametime, educational institutions and educators must prioritize access and equity
so that all youth will be able to develop
the skills, strategies, and metacognitive
thinking through ongoing practice. Inturn, this can support youth to navigate
the opportunities and challenges in thedigital age and become more effective
and thoughtful civic actors.
Notes
1. M. Barthel, A. Mitchell, and J. Holcomb, “Many
Americans Believe Fake News is Sowing Confusion,”
Pew Research Center (2016, December), www.
journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believefake-news-is-sowing-confusion/.

2. S. McGrew, J. Breakstone, T. Ortega, M. Smith, and
S. Wineburg, “Can Students Evaluate Online
Sources? Learning from Assessments of Civic
Online Reasoning,” Theory & Research in Social
Education (2018). Advance online publication.
3. M. Lodge and C. Taber, “Implicit Affect for Political
Candidates, Parties, and Issues: An Experimental
Test of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis,” Political
Psychology 26 (2005): 455–482.
4. Z. Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,”
Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990): 480-498; C. S.
Taber and M. Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the
Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” American Journalof Political Science 50 (2006): 755–769.
5. D. P. Redlawsk, “Hot Cognition or Cool
Consideration? Testing the Effects of MotivatedReasoning on Political Decision Making,” Journalof Politics 64, no. 4 (2002): 1021–1044,
doi:10.1111/1468-2508.00161
6. E. Palmer, “The Real Problem with Fake News,”
Educational Leadership 75, no. 3 (2017), para. 6,

nov17/vol75/num03/The-Real-Problem-with-FakeNews.aspx.

7. J. Kahne and B. Bowyer, “Educating for Democracy
in a Partisan Age: Confronting the Challenges of
Motivated Reasoning and Misinformation,”
American Educational Research Journal 54 (2017):
3–34.
8. J. Kahne, E. Hodgin, and E. Eidman-Aadahl,“Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age:
Participatory Politics and the Pursuit of Democratic
Engagement,” Theory & Research in Social
Education 44 (2016): 1–35.
9. E. Hargittai, “Digital Na(t)ives? Variation inInternet Skills and Uses Among Members of the‘Net Generation,’” Sociological Inquiry 80 (2010):
92-113.
10. J. Kahne and E. Middaugh, Democracy for Some:
The Civic Opportunity Gap in High School[CIRCLE Working Paper 59], (2008), www.
civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP59Kahne.
pdf; R. B. Putnam, C. B. Frederick, and K. Snellman,“Growing Class Gaps in Social Connectedness
Among American Youth.” (Paper presented at
Saguaro Seminar, Harvard University, August 2012),
www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/SaguaroReport_DivergingSocialConnect
edness_20120808.pdf.
11. McGrew et al., “Can Students Evaluate Online
Sources?”
12. Ibid., 2.
13. J. Breakstone, S. McGrew, M. Smith, T. Ortega, and
S. Wineburg, “Why We Need a New Approach to
Teaching Digital Literacy,” Phi Delta Kappan(2018), www.kappanonline.org/breakstone-neednew-approach-teaching-digital-literacy/.
14. J. B. Biggs, Student Approaches to Learning andStudying (Hawthorn, Victoria: Australian Council
for Educational Research, 1987); J. D. Bransford,
A. L. Brown, and R. R. Cocking, eds., How People
Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. 2000).
15. H. G. Lavine, C. D. Johnston, and M. R. Steenbergen,
The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty
Promotes Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
16. E. Middaugh, When Media Literacy Meets Issue
Advocacy: Adolescents’ Use of Media Literacy
Strategies In Civic Inquiry (Paper presented at theannual meeting of the College and University
Faculty Assembly of the National Council for theSocial Studies, San Francisco, Calif., November2017).
17. J. Kahne, C. Evans, E. Hodgin, and Y. W. Choi,“Equitable Education for Democracy in the Digital
Age: A District-Wide Approach,” in Diversifying
Digital Learning: Online Literacy and Educational
Opportunity, eds. W. G. Tierney, Z. B. Corwin andA. Ochsner (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins
University Press, 2018), 25–44.
18. P. Mihailidis, “Beyond Cynicism: Media Education
and Civic Learning Outcomes in the University,”
International Journal of Learning and Media 1, no.
3 (2009): 1–13.
19. Kahne and Bowyer, “Educating for Democracy ina Partisan Age”; H. Martens and R. Hobbs, “HowMedia Literacy Supports Civic Engagement in the
Digital Age,” Journal of Communication 23 (2015):
120–137.

Erica Hodgin is the Associate Director of the
Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG), www.
civicsurvey.org, at the University of California,
Riverside and the Project Director of the Leveraging Equity and Access in Democratic Education(LEADE) Initiative. Joseph Kahne holds the
Dutton Presidential Chair for Education Policy and
Politics at the University of California at Riverside.
His work can be found at @jkahne, jkahne@ucr.edu,
and civcisurvey.org.

Thanks to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation for their support of this work. This paper
is modified from an academically oriented study of thesame topic titled “Judging Credibility in Un-Credible
Times: Three Educational Approaches for the
Digital Age” and published in Fake News: Why It Is
Problematic and What We Can Do About It.

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