The CNN app on a mobile device in Cottonwood Heights on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News
Students in New Jersey will soon be learning more than just reading, writing and arithmetic after a new law passed mandating K-12 schools teach information literacy.
The law, which passed with bipartisan support, requires the state’s board of education to adopt new learning standards to teach students about topics including the difference between facts, points of view and opinions, and how information is created and produced.
“Teaching children about information literacy will help them to weigh the flood of news, opinion, and social media they are exposed to both online and off,” Republican state Sen. Michael Testa said in a statement.
Testa said the law wasn’t “about teaching kids that any specific idea is true or false, rather it’s about helping them learn how to research, evaluate, and understand the information they are presented for themselves.”
Information literacy has become increasingly important as digital media has made it easier for mis- and disinformation to travel.
Olga Polites, an educator and leader of the New Jersey chapter of Media Literacy Now, said she began noticing students sharing inaccurate information, sometimes from sources posing as local news outlets, in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s.
“Some of the information that they were sharing, especially in the classroom, wasn’t always accurate,” she said. “Students would report publications that simply didn’t exist.”
She eventually began teaching students about topics like the difference between scholarly and popular sources of information and lateral reading, or finding articles on the same topic by different authors and outlets to determine if it’s accurate. She said she noticed a change “immediately.”
“I would have them either type in the headline that the student read out loud or the alleged source that they got it from and then it became almost a kind of game,” she said.
Information literacy has become especially important with the rise of “news deserts,” or areas with limited access to credible local news. Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative found that 70 million Americans — or about one-fifth of the U.S. population — live in communities that either are or are at risk of becoming news deserts. In some cases, hyperpartisan sites posing as local news outlets have attempted to fill the void.
“We really need to think about — within education circles, but also in policy circles — how do we ensure that we contribute to the development of strong citizens,” Polites said. “I mean ultimately, that’s what K-12 education is about.”
Dani Kauerz Sloan, a member of Utah’s Digital Wellness, Citizenship and Safe Technology Commission, said 20 years ago, it was simple to teach things like internet safety or spotting the difference between .com and .edu.
“That is just not the case anymore, and so it’s really important that we teach our teachers and our students to question all of the information that they’re being given and learn how to fact check like a real fact checker on the news does,” she said.
Utah Education Network, which provides resources for educators, offers a six-week Developing Digital Detectives course for teachers every semester. The course covers topics like triggers, or whether information is designed to trigger emotional responses so people are more likely to share it, and teaching news consumers to slow down and look for more credibility cues.
“We live in a post-first, ask-questions-never society,” Sloan said. “Like, ‘oh, this news story fits my echo chamber, I’m posting it,’ and we might not even click on the link to read it.”
Information literacy is more than just an education issue. The Department of Homeland Security published its own media literacy guide in 2021, warning about technology making it easier for propaganda and misinformation to spread.
Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Texas also have policies requiring media literacy in their education standards, according to Media Literacy Now. Utah and Washington were rated as demonstrating strong progress toward media literacy education policy.
“In a perfect world, information literacy, media literacy, news literacy, digital citizenship would be taught every day across the K-12 curriculum,” Sloan said. “But the fact of the matter is if we don’t have teachers who have had any kind of information literacy or digital citizenship training, we can’t expect them to be doing that.”