Scales for Assessing News Literacy Education in the Digital Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 107769582093098
Author(s):  
Naomi R. Johnson ◽  
Kris Paal ◽  
Erin Waggoner ◽  
Karen Bleier
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Digital News ◽  
Education Interventions ◽  
News Literacy ◽  
Knowledge Scale

Concerns about “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation have led to increasingly urgent calls for News Literacy (NL) education interventions and assessments of their effectiveness. New technologies create ongoing changes in the ways people consume news, which means that NL education assessments must be continuously updated and adapted to address current trends. The purpose of this study was to augment existing NL assessments to incorporate recent aspects of hard news consumption in digital news environments by testing two new scales: the Headline Literacy Scale and the Hard News Standards Knowledge Scale. The results demonstrated both scales were reliable and valid.

scholarly journals The Influence of Political Ideology on Fake News Belief: The Portuguese Case

Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
João Pedro Baptista ◽  
Elisete Correia ◽  
Anabela Gradim ◽  
Valeriano Piñeiro-Naval
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Psychological Aspects ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Digital News ◽  
News Literacy ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between a subject’s ideological persuasion with the belief and spread of fake news is the object of our study. Departing from a left- vs. right-wing framework, a questionnaire sought to position subjects on this political-ideological spectrum and demanded them to evaluate five pro-left and pro-right fake and real news, totaling 20 informational products. The results show the belief and dissemination of (fake) news are related to the political ideology of the participants, with right-wing subjects exhibiting a greater tendency to accept fake news, regardless of whether it is pro-left or pro-right fake news. These findings contradict the confirmation bias and may suggest that a greater influence of factors such as age, the level of digital news literacy and psychological aspects in the judgment of fake news are at play. Older and less educated respondents indicated they believed and would disseminate fake news at greater rates. Regardless of the ideology they favor, the Portuguese attributed higher credibility to the sample’s real news, a fact that can be meaningful regarding the fight against disinformation in Portugal and elsewhere.

News Credibility and Media Literacy in the Digital Age

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jean Tsang
Keyword(s):  
Media Literacy ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Content ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
News Credibility

With the hostile media phenomenon as an overarching framework, this chapter discusses how challenging it can be for media literacy education to successfully combat motivated reasoning in which individuals are likely to be hostile when exposed to news content that is incongruent with their personal point of view. Such discussion is vital in times when news audiences are cynical and skeptical towards both politicians and media agencies. Given the importance of understanding and studying individuals' perceptions of news biases and assessments of news credibility, this chapter makes a case for establishing more objective standards for journalistic work to overcome the challenges brought about by the rise of fake news in the digital era.

News Credibility and Media Literacy in the Digital Age

2021 ◽  
pp. 544-564
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jean Tsang
Keyword(s):  
Media Literacy ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Content ◽  
Media Literacy Education ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
News Credibility

With the hostile media phenomenon as an overarching framework, this chapter discusses how challenging it can be for media literacy education to successfully combat motivated reasoning in which individuals are likely to be hostile when exposed to news content that is incongruent with their personal point of view. Such discussion is vital in times when news audiences are cynical and skeptical towards both politicians and media agencies. Given the importance of understanding and studying individuals' perceptions of news biases and assessments of news credibility, this chapter makes a case for establishing more objective standards for journalistic work to overcome the challenges brought about by the rise of fake news in the digital era.

Teaching Poetry through Classroom Flipping among Prospective Teachers in a College of Education ? Action Research Report

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr. A. Joycilin Shermila
Keyword(s):  
Active Learning ◽  
Learning Community ◽  
Prospective Teachers ◽  
Flipped Classroom ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
College Of Education ◽  
Learning Technologies ◽  
Research Report ◽  
Digital Era

Times have changed and teachers have evolved. New technologies have opened up the classroom to the outside world. Teachers who were seen with textbooks and blackboard are now using varied technological tools to empower learners to publish works and engage learners with live audience in real contexts. In this digital era an ever-expanding array of powerful software has been made available. The flipped classroom is a shift from passive to active learning to focus on higher order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This model of teaching combines pedagogy and learning technologies. Significant learning happens through facilitating active learning through engaged learners. In this approach learning materials are provided through text, video, audio and multimedia. Students take responsibility of their learning. They work together applying course concepts with guidance from the instructor. This increased interaction helps to create a learning community that encourages them to build knowledge inside and outside the classroom.

THE USE OF CRITICAL THINKING AGAINST FAKE NEWS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra-Niculina Babii
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Informal Logic ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
Legal Sanctions ◽  
The One

The digital era has determined a very easy creation and propagation of fake news. As a consequence, it has become harder for people to fight this malicious phenomenon. However, the only weapon that can have results in this informational war is critical thinking. But who should use it? The creators of fake news that do this for different reasons? The social platforms that allow the circulation of fake news with ease? Mass media which does not always verify with much attention and rigour the information they spread? The Governments that should apply legal sanctions? Or the consumer that receives all the fake news, him being the final target? Even if critical thinking would be useful for every actor on fake news’ stage, the one who needs it the most is the consumer. This comes together with the big responsibility placed on his shoulders. Even if others are creating and spreading disinformation, the consumer must be aware and be careful with the information he encounters on a daily basis. He should use his reasoning and he should not believe everything just because it is on the Internet. How can he do that? Critical thinking seems to be a quite difficult tool to use, especially for non-specialized individuals. This paper’s aim is to propose a simplified model of critical thinking that can contribute to detecting fake news with the help of people’s self judgement. The model is based on theories from Informal Logic considering the structure of arguments and on Critical Discourse Analysis theories concerning the patterns found in the content of the information.

scholarly journals Credibility of Digital Political News in Spain: Comparison between Traditional Media and Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Reinald Besalú ◽  
Carles Pont-Sorribes
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Item ◽  
Digital Television ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Political News ◽  
Digital News ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Digital Formats

In the context of the dissemination of fake news and the traditional media outlets’ loss of centrality, the credibility of digital news emerges as a key factor for today’s democracies. The main goal of this paper was to identify the levels of credibility that Spanish citizens assign to political news in the online environment. A national survey (n = 1669) was designed to assess how the news format affected credibility and likelihood of sharing. Four different news formats were assessed, two of them linked to traditional media (digital newspapers and digital television) and two to social media (Facebook and WhatsApp). Four experimental groups assigned a credibility score and a likelihood of sharing score to four different political news items presented in the aforementioned digital formats. The comparison between the mean credibility scores assigned to the same news item presented in different formats showed significant differences among groups, as did the likelihood of sharing the news. News items shown in a traditional media format, especially digital television, were assigned more credibility than news presented in a social media format, and participants were also more likely to share the former, revealing a more cautious attitude towards social media as a source of news.

scholarly journals Linguistic drivers of misinformation diffusion on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Textual Cues ◽  
Twitter Users

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.

scholarly journals Personality factors and self-reported political news consumption predict susceptibility to political fake news

2021 ◽  
Vol 174 ◽  
pp. 110666
Author(s):  
Dustin P. Calvillo ◽  
Ryan J.B. Garcia ◽  
Kiana Bertrand ◽  
Tommi A. Mayers
Keyword(s):  
Personality Factors ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Consumption
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