Urgent need for media literacy education at all levels

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This week’s Higher Education Newsletter comes from Sarah Butrymnowicz, the investigations editor at The Hechinger Report and an expert in data analysis.

When Jevin West read the news rife with number-heavy coverage of both Covid-19 and the election last fall, he kept finding new examples to bring to his class on data literacy and misinformation at the University of Washington.

West, an associate professor, and Professor Carl Bergstrom teach “Calling BS: Data Reasoning in a Digital World” (although the actual course listing uses the more colorful language). Their course covers everything from interpreting data visualizations to understanding publication bias in academic literature to identifying fake news. They’ve never had a shortage of material to work with.

“Almost every day there were things we could put in,” West, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said of the fall. “You have infinite material to pull from in real time.”

Launched in 2017, Calling BS became an instant hit at the University of Washington; it fills its 150-student capacity quickly each year. The syllabus – including YouTube videos of the lectures – is also available for free to any teacher who wants to use it. To date, faculty at more than 100 colleges, including foreign schools, community colleges and Ivy League universities, have reached out about adopting the course in what West describes as a “BS movement.”

Indeed, as conspiracy theories spread across social media and misleading news stories are shared in internet echo chambers, educators across the country – and the world – are trying to battle misinformation by teaching students to be better consumers of news, media and data. Some universities, like UW, offer individual courses with this focus. Others have developed media literacy minors or even graduate certificates focused on the topic. The goal is to give students the tools they need to assess information for the rest of their professional and personal lives.

Calling BS focuses primarily on how data is created, manipulated and shared. When students enter the classroom, they’re well aware of the problem of misinformation, West said, but they lack the confidence and know-how to interpret data. He wants to teach them to be on the lookout for “misinformation that comes wrapped in data.”

“It’s difficult to learn and to trust information if we’re not aware of some of these ways information is manipulated,” West said.

Whether focused on media literacy or data literacy, research suggests a need for this type of education in general. A 2016 study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that significant numbers of middle schoolers, high schoolers and college students could not adequately judge the credibility of online information.

“Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study’s authors wrote.

College students were easily duped by biased websites with “high production values,” including links to news organizations and “polished ‘About’ pages.” More than 80 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between sponsored content and actual news stories.

The middle school exercise was almost not included in the study because researchers thought it was too easy, said Sam Wineburg, a Stanford professor and the lead author of the report. “We were stunned,” he said of the overall results.

West believes that while his class provides students with a useful framework, waiting until students get to college – and often are in their senior year – to start to teach information consumption skills is a mistake. He and Bergstrom have tried to make the curriculum, or even individual pieces of it, easy for overworked high school teachers to integrate into the classes they’re already teaching.

Interest from students and teachers has shown how widespread the need for this kind of education is, West said. At the University of Washington, students from more than 40 majors have enrolled in the class. Elsewhere, the course has been incorporated into classes in multiple fields including engineering, statistics, English, economics and business.

“It touches everything. It touches every subject,” West said. “It’s something that needs to be required at all colleges.”

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