The Stanford History Education Group gave thousands of high school students "civic online reasoning" assessments to gauge their digital media literacy skills.
The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) gave thousands of high school students "civic online reasoning" assessments to gauge their digital media literacy skills. The report based on the test describes the results as "troubling."
With an eye toward the 2020 presidential election, political misinformation, and voting eligibility of some high school students, the exercises tested the students' ability to evaluate digital sources. Ninety percent of the students failed to get any credit on four of the six assessments they took.
The full report can be viewed here. See below for the summary.
For educators interested in media and digital literacy focused on civics, SHEG developed civic online reasoning lesson plans for middle and high school students.
The next presidential election is in our sights. Many high school students will be eligible to vote in 2020. Are these first-time voters better prepared to go online and discern fact from fiction? Overview In November 2016, the Stanford History Education Group released a study showing that young people lacked basic skills of digital evaluation. Since then, a whole host of efforts—including legislative initiatives in 18 states—have sought to address this problem. National Survey From June 2018 to May 2019, we administered an assessment to 3,446 students, a national sample that matches the demographic profile of high school students in the United States. The six exercises in our assessment gauged students’ ability to evaluate digital sources on the open internet. The results—if they can be summarized in a word—are troubling:
Nearly all students floundered. Ninety percent received no credit on four of six tasks. Reliable information is to civic health what proper sanitation and potable water are to public health. A polluted information supply imperils our nation’s civic health. We need high-quality digital literacy curricula, validated by rigorous research, to guarantee the vitality of American democracy. Education moves slowly. Technology doesn’t. If we don’t act with urgency, our students’ ability to engage in civic life will be the casualty. |
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