Social Education 208 Media Literacy Misinformation in the Information Age: What Teachers Can Do to Support Students Erica Hodgin and Joe Kahne I feel like it’s my job to help [my students] do a better job of discriminating [between] what is actual news that would be trustworthy or even less biased [and] other sources. So that’s what I work on for this first year, and hopefully people will work on for the rest of their lives. Because it’s challenging. (9th grade Humanities Teacher - Dallas, Texas) The context that motivates this teacher’s sentiment is clear. Both youth and adults struggle to judge the credibility of what they find online. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 64 percent of adults believe fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion, and 23 percent said they had shared fabricated politi- cal stories themselves—sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally. 1 Studies also indicate that youth struggle with this challenge as well. A 2016 study including middle school, high school, and college students showed that many youth cannot tell the difference between a real news story and “sponsored content” (or an advertisement). 2 Teachers, as well as the public, often look at these findings and decide that the problem is one of capacity. “Youth must learn how to judge the credibility of online content!” Certainly, this mat- ters but it is an incomplete diagnosis. Reasoning and analytic capacities are not enough, especially when it comes to civic and political information. One thing that makes learning and thinking about politics different than many other subjects is that students (along with adults) often have strong prior beliefs regarding these topics. Few students have staked out a position on electrons prior to learning about them. The same cannot be said of questions revolving around abortion policy, or gun laws, or any number of hot button issues. And the research is clear. Prior beliefs can be enormously influential on students’ judgements of the credibility of truth claims related to controversial issues. For instance, Lodge and Taber found that emotions often surface when engag- ing with socio-political concepts. These emotions, in turn, trigger what’s called “hot cognition,” whereby positive and negative feelings bias subsequent infor- mation processing. 3 This can lead indi- viduals to seek out evidence that aligns with their preexisting views (confirma- tion bias), to attempt to dismiss perspec- tives that contradict their beliefs (discon- firmation bias), and to consider claims that align with their views as stronger and more accurate (prior attitude effect). 4 These dynamics, which psychologists call directional motivation, can limit an individual’s ability to learn from diverse viewpoints, especially when it comes to politicized topics. In fact, Redlawsk found that individuals who encountered new information that contradicted their prior perspective often become more committed to their prior beliefs rather than learning from the new information. 5 It’s easy to see how these motivations can undermine judgments of credibil- ity. Rather than focusing on whether a statement is accurate, youth—like adults— often focus on whether a statement sup- ports their prior beliefs. These problems are exacerbated by (a) the growth of the Internet which makes it easier to circulate such content, (b) increasing partisanship, which means people are even more likely to focus on what their “team” says regardless of whether its accurate, and (c) diminished trust in institutions like the news media. Given these dynam- ics, it is fundamentally important that educators support youth in developing a “healthy level of skepticism” so they can critically evaluate online informa- tion while at the same time identifying trustworthy sources of news. 6 Does Civic Media Literacy Instruction Make a Diference? Although the field is new, early research demonstrates that civic media literacy education can be significantly beneficial. Specifically, drawing on survey data from a nationally representative sample of young people, we found that those with no civic media literacy learning oppor- tunities were just as likely to judge inac- curate posts as accurate as they were posts that used factually accurate evidence. Social Education 82(4), pp. 208–211, 214 ©2018 National Council for the Social Studies