(Dis)information Competency Series

There is so much potential to use news to teach information competency and critical thinking skills within the context of your discipline. Instead of only relying on news alerts, social media, and news aggregator sites that are algorithmically-driven, have students actively seek out the news and apply evaluation criteria to determine credibility.

Below are some ideas:

• Show the News Media Bias Chart and have students read from news publications across the political spectrum and compare how an issue is covered differently in each publication.
• Have students follow a single issue in the news over time. What journalists specialize in the subject (for example, which journalists cover homelessness in Los Angeles or local politics or climate change in California)? Follow that journalist on social media to keep up with the story.
• Throughout the semester, have students find and read news articles related to a subject covered in class. Have students apply the News Literacy Project's 7 standard of quality journalism to the articles they find.
• Ask students to compare different types of sources on the same topic, such as a news or magazine article reporting the result of a study and the study itself, then discuss which is most credible and why (Faix and Fyn 2020).
• Beginning with an article from a popular magazine that refers to a research study, have students click through to the study itself and analyze whether it was misquoted or misused  (Faix and Fyn 2020).
• The Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA) is an open access resource for faculty and librarians. Here are assignments that use news: News-related assignments in CORA

Have ideas to share? Contribute to the Google doc! Ideas for Contextualizing News by Academic Discipline

• The Finding Newspapers guide introduces students to newspapers they have access to for free (online and in print) at the GCC Library.
• The News and Media Literacy workshop is an asynchronous workshop in Canvas that builds students' news literacy skills. Workshop information for faculty, including how to verify student attendance, can be found here: https://campusguides.glendale.edu/library/instruction/faculty
• Assign the library's Check Please! tutorial that teaches students how to use SIFT to evaluate online information sources. The tutorial is 60 minutes long and generates a certificate upon completion.
• See How to Create Effective and Meaningful Research Assignments

The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan education nonprofit that advances the practice of news literacy throughout American society, creating better informed, more engaged and more empowered individuals — and ultimately a stronger democracy. They offer a suite of free tools and services created for educators.

According to a 2018 study, 82% of US college students think that news is important for a democracy, yet 36% of them don’t trust any news no matter what source it comes from.

Source: Alison J. Head, John Wihbey, P. Takis Metaxas, Margy MacMillan, and Dan Cohen (October 16, 2018), How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians, Project Information Literacy Research Institute, https://projectinfolit.org/publications/news-study/‎

"...research has shown that students who take news literacy courses have significantly higher levels of news media literacy, a greater knowledge of current events, and higher motivation to consume news, compared with students who had not taken a news literacy course."

Source: Maksl, Craft, S., Ashley, S., & Miller, D. (2017). The Usefulness of a News Media Literacy Measure in Evaluating a News Literacy Curriculum. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 72(2), 228–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695816651970

"There’s also research that shows that students who learn any media literacy skills in school are less likely to believe conspiracy theories"

Source: Science Fictions: Low Science Knowledge and Poor Critical Thinking are Linked to Conspiracy Beliefs. (2022). Reboot Foundation. https://reboot-foundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reboot-Science-Fictions-Final.pdf