Libraries are the foundation of democracy.
No other organization is devoted to freely sharing information, and helping to connect people with information they need and want.
To make it even better – we help our community members to find information that is real, truthful, valid, and reliable.
It doesn’t seem like this should be such a big deal, but it really is!
Any time I see the term “fake news” I want to immediately tear out my eyeballs. I hate this trend of calling information we don’t like fake. I also hate the trend of flagrant lies and obvious shading of the truth as something we are supposed to just accept from all sorts of sources.
No.
I’m not having it.
Mistakes can happen, and that’s understandable. But as a profession, our work is devoted to finding good, correct information. We don’t focus on the content – it’s not our business what our patrons want to learn about or read about – but we provide the best, most accurate information sources.
We are sharing an excerpt of the article below, giving ideas for teachers to help combat truth decay. School library people can – and should! – insert themselves right into this education process in medial literacy. (Click the link to get the entire article!)
Can Media Literacy Combat ‘Truth Decay’?
What Teachers Should Know
“As “fake news” proliferates and heated political debates rage online, more teachers are turning to media literacy to help their students make sense of how information is created and distributed today.
In a new report, the RAND Corporation surveyed this developing landscape of media literacy education. Through interviews with a dozen media literacy experts and a review of studies on educational interventions, researchers examined how media literacy is defined, what instructional resources are available, and how effective media literacy education is in guarding against the spread of misinformation.
They found that though experts say media literacy is urgently important, there isn’t one universal skill set for the discipline—making it difficult to evaluate and compare educational programs.
The report is the latest installment in the RAND Corporation’s study of what they call “truth decay,” or the blurring of the lines between opinion and objective fact. The first report in the series, which my colleague Stephen Sawchuk wrote about last year, attempted to define the problem and identify its source.
In that 2018 report, the researchers wrote that the public increasingly prioritizes opinion and personal experience over facts—and that the veracity of established fact is now up for debate. Political polarization, cognitive biases, and the rise of social media are partially to blame, they argued. But the education system also plays a role. The pressure on schools to prioritize reading and math, coupled with the difficulty the education system faces in adapting to rapid change, means that students aren’t always learning how to be critical consumers of information.
That’s where media literacy comes in, said Alice Huguet, an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and the lead author on this new report. Explicitly teaching these skills is one way to combat truth decay, and to help people become “better prepared to enter the information ecosystem,” she said.
In interviews in this new report, experts said that broadly, media literacy refers to the ability to find, critically interpret, and create media. But under this large umbrella, there are lots of subfields that deal with specific types of information—such as news literacy, digital literacy, and science literacy.
The report also found that there are different ways of conceptualizing media literacy’s purpose. Goals vary, from vetting the quality of information, to uncovering the financial motivations behind certain messages, to understanding media’s role in civic and political life.
Ultimately, though, there isn’t conclusive evidence about which approaches are most effective in K-12 classrooms. The studies researchers reviewed differed in how they defined and measured media literacy skills, and there weren’t many studies that measured the effects of specific interventions. Overall though, correlational research has suggested that teaching media literacy skills can improve students’ ability to analyze and interpret information, said Huguet.”
Read the entire article right here!