College Education, Life on Campus

The Power of Informed Decision-Making: Enhancing News Literacy Among College Students

Sam Bowman

Teaching students new literacy is more important today than ever before. The rise of misinformation, AI-generated videos, and propaganda on social media means that young people are constantly bombarded by fake news and fabricated facts.

Helping college students to parse fact from fiction gives them a chance to make better-informed decisions. It also boosts their critical thinking skills, which will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

However, teaching news and media literacy can be tricky. The proliferation of disinformation means that you may even fall foul of fake news yourself while trying to aid your students. This means that, rather than telling students what to think, you should focus your efforts on teaching college students methods for how to think.

News Literacy as a Life Skill

As an adult who has lived through pandemics and riots, you know first-hand how important news literacy and accurate reporting are. However, many of your students may be reluctant to partake in classes that teach them how to parse fact from fiction. As a professor, it’s your job to increase engagement with your teaching materials by convincing your students that research and critical thinking are life skills worth refining.

You can increase engagement in your critical thinking classes by highlighting case studies of conspiracies and misinformation that have harmed the general public. High-profile examples of misinformation, like Pizzagate or the burning of teepees at Standing Rock, can resonate with students and help them understand the importance of becoming an informed, discerning consumer of media.

Teaching students life skills like news literacy can aid their career development aspirations, too. People who can assess news sources and make informed decisions are far more likely to hit their professional goals and achieve success in their lives. Fun ways to teach life skills like news literacy include:

Use interactive lesson plans to involve students in the fact-checking process
Use role-playing games to expose how easily misinformation can spread without proper vetting of information

These activities can engage your classroom and get students working together to bolster news literacy. Even simple lesson plans — like fact-checking contentious claims together as a group — can bolster news literacy in your classroom and support your efforts to produce informed citizens ready to take on the world after graduation.

Source Credibility

The easiest way to assess the accuracy of breaking news items is to evaluate the credibility of the source that it is attributed to. This means you’ll want to teach your students to recognize the signs of a credible source. When assessing source credibility, teach your students to look for:

Date: Is the source still in date? Research and data published more than ten years ago may be accurate, but it’s likely that a more accurate, updated version exists.
Editorial Oversight: Social media is unreliable as people who post online have little to editorial oversight. More reliable sources have plenty of checks in place and are forthcoming about how they vet their information.
Transparency: Reliable news sources don’t always get it right. Rather than burying these inaccuracies, these news sources will highlight their mistakes and strive to provide fixes.
Bias: Most news sources have political biases. However, this doesn’t make them unreliable (although they may present a certain spin on the information).

Crucially, credible new sources do make mistakes. However, this doesn’t mean there is an equivalence between the accuracy of the information published on a reputable news source like the BBC and a relatively unknown new profile that posts conspiracy theories on X. By opting for news sources that have a history of reliable reporting and are transparent about their sources, students can stay clear of misinformation and fake news.

Understanding Bias

Students who understand the importance of accurate facts and transparent reporting are often shocked to find that reliable news sources have different takes on the facts surrounding an event or issue. As an educator, it’s your job to help students understand that gathering accurate information is only one part of informed decision-making. In order to make truly informed decisions, students should strive to expose themselves to multiple interpretations of the same facts.

You can help students become critical thinkers by providing activities that force them to discern facts by comparing news stories from multiple publications. Students can fall into an echo chamber of their own making while searching for news sources that already appeal to their existing value systems.

When comparing sources, ask students to consider whether some of the opinions they find carry more weight than others. This task should be fairly straightforward but highlights the importance of assessing who is saying what and why. For example, when considering a hot topic like climate change, you should encourage students to weigh up whether or not the opinions of the top 380 climate scientists should carry more weight than a podcaster known for poor fact-checking and spreading misinformation.

Conclusion

Misinformation spreads fast in the digital age. As a teacher, you can give students a fighting chance against AI-generated headlines and propaganda by teaching them how to assess news sources. Just be sure to go beyond fact-finding, as college students will need to learn how to analyze the facts they’ve gathered to become informed citizens in an increasingly divisive world.