Students Evaluating and Corroborating Digital News

Abstract

In this study, we investigate how 2,216 Swedish upper secondary school students' performances of sourcing, evaluating evidence, and corroborating digital news relate to their background, educational orientation attitudes, and self-rated skills. We used a combined online survey and performance test to investigate students' abilities to evaluate online news. Findings confirm and challenge previous research results about civic online reasoning. The most prominent effect on performance is the appreciation of credible news. This attitude is related to students' abilities to source news, evaluate texts and images, and corroborate a misleading climate change website. We also found a digital civic literacy divide between students on theoretical and vocational programs with different knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Noting the democratic challenge of misinformation, we call for more research on how education can support digital civic literacy in general and specific ways.

Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden

“…What has been noted in media and information literacy research is that pupils often struggle to separate credible from misleading digital multimodal information [12,14]. Even individuals with proficient news media knowledge may struggle to evaluate evidence online [17,43].…”

“…Building resilience to fake news requires navigating online information in new ways and with the support of digital tools, similar to the methods used by professional factcheckers [7][8][9]. Because new technology makes it hard to see the difference between a fake and a real video [10] or to distinguish a misleading image in a tweet from a credible one [11], teenagers often struggle to determine the credibility of images and videos when these are presented in deceptive ways [12][13][14]. Citizens need a combination of digital knowledge, attitudes, and skills to navigate the complicated digital world of post-truth, as highlighted by theories of media and information literacy, such as transliteracy [15] and technocognition [8].…”

“…Young people growing up in an era of online misinformation have been found to struggle to separate fake news from real news [12,14,[16][17][18]. Teenagers stating that they are quite skilled at fact-checking may not hold the skills they think they have [13,19].…”

“…The idea that young people are digital natives, knowing how to navigate digital media much better than other generations, does not have any support in the research. Instead, there is a call for educational efforts to promote the media and information literacy of teenagers with diverse backgrounds [14,20,21].…”

“…Research has highlighted the existence of a media and information literacy divide between people and pupils in different groups, highlighting a digital inequality between citizens [14,[22][23][24][25]. Teenagers with poor socio-economic status may spend more time online on entertainment and simple tasks than peers with better support from home, and they may also find it difficult to separate fake news from real news [14,21,26,27]. Access to computers will not automatically bridge this divide since source-critical thinking has multiple interlinked dimensions and it is very complex and intellectually challenging to determine whom to trust online [28,29].…”