Clarification: This article has been updated to better describe the work of Media Literacy Now.
On a chilly November morning here, Brie Wattier’s 8th graders at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School had their eyes trained on the slides projected at the front of the class.
“What are the good things about social media?” the slides read. “What are the bad things?”
A bunch of hands shot up. Some students were confident that social media helps connect them with like-minded people and learn new skills, like cooking. Others were less sure of its benefits. Social media can spread rumors or make you compare yourself constantly to others, they said.
This opening gave Wattier, who is piloting a year-long course to teach students skills to determine what’s true online so they can be more informed citizens, a chance to pose a harder question: “Is social media more helpful or harmful to a democracy?”
This time, the class was more united in their response, with the presidential election results still fresh on their minds—social media, they said, can influence how you vote, and what goes viral may not be the most accurate information.
Wattier finally asked the question at the heart of the class: “How can we trust the information we get on social media?”
Training a critical lens on information, whether online or offline, has become an essential skill for students, she said in an interview before the class.
“Some of my students in middle school may be eligible to vote in the next election cycle,” she said. “It’s never too early to teach them these skills.”
The misinformation and “fear mongering” before the election has made it even more important to rely on credible sources of information, Wattier added: “Students were asking me stuff like if Trump could run for a third term, or if slavery might come back.”
A growing emphasis on digital citizenship education
The University of Maryland created this course on “digital civic inquiry” and trained a cohort of 15 Washington social studies teachers—including Wattier—over the summer on how to teach it. The course is based on the city’s newly adopted social studies standards released in 2023, which emphasize that students need to learn how to “gather diverse perspectives” to evaluate information they see online.
Ninteen states have taken legislative action to include digital citizenship and media literacy in their schools. How these standards are developed and implemented varies between states, according to a 2023 report by Media Literacy Now, nonprofit that advocates to ensure all K-12 students are taught media literacy. The largely bipartisan efforts are in response to a growing need in schools—helping students identify credible information and use social media safely, a task that’s getting harder with the explosion of artificial intelligence-generated content and “deepfakes.”
This training, though, must be consistent to be effective, said Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the university’s college of education who helped create the course that Wattier’s now teaching. The training can’t just kick in when “students bring in random [misinformation] to the class or if they are doing a research project,” she said.
“We then try to quickly teach them how to evaluate sources so that they don’t end up with crazy things on their reference pages,” McGrew said. “But the process of inquiry needs to be embedded in the [ongoing] curriculum.”
This work is supported in part by a U.S. Department of Education grant. McGrew and her team also partnered with Washington’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education and the civics education nonprofit Close Up Foundation.
To meet lofty goals, teachers need to start with the basics
The course is broadly divided into a few steps. Students must find evidence for claims or information they find online and evaluate if it’s coming from a credible and unbiased source. But even before they do this, there’s a crucial step that’s currently missing from the way students digest information.
“Students, for the most part, aren’t thinking about the source at all. They’re just scrolling through social media feeds,” McGrew said. “That’s the way the internet is designed. We need kids to stop and think about trustworthiness and expertise behind the information they’re reading.”
That’s why “lateral reading” is one of the key skills taught in the course. For example, if a student sees information on one website, they need to go to multiple other websites to corroborate it. The same principles apply to TikTok or Instagram, McGrew said, although the course doesn’t focus on those apps specifically.
Once that “restraint” is built, the next step is to evaluate the information based on the source’s trustworthiness and expertise. Students explore questions about the source’s background, if the sources are experts in that subject, or if they’ve conferred with other experts in coming up with their viewpoint.
For instance, the first unit of the course exposes students to the concept of affordable housing in the nation’s capital. Wattier shared source documents from the Urban Institute, a non-profit think tank, and a luxury real estate firm.
“The students concluded that the Urban Institute is a credible source. Even if they aren’t experts themselves, they have consulted experts,” Wattier said. “On the other hand, [the real estate firm] may be experts on housing, but students questioned what’s in it for them to talk about affordable housing.”
The class decided that they could trust the Urban Institute more than the real estate company.
These aren’t straightforward tasks for students, though. Wattier also had to teach the meaning and significance behind words like think tanks, liberal versus conservative, and revenue. Wattier wanted her students to look out for those words to establish a source’s credibility and realized she had to be “a lot more explicit” about the connection.
Some of the teachers in the training cohort are teaching this course in bilingual classes, meaning they have to collect sources in both English and Spanish.
“I use Newsela to find Spanish language sources, which are usually articles taken from outlets like the Associated Press,” said Sonija Parson, a middle and high school studies teacher at the Sojourner Truth Montessori School in Washington.
In civics education now, it’s important to deal with the barrage of both useful and harmful information students are now exposed to, said Eric Soto-Shed, an education lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, while speaking with Education Week this fall on civics courses that tackle misinformation and political participation.
Critically analyzing this information is only step one, though. The next step is for students to understand the kind of information ecosystem they live in, he added.
“What is it about sensational media ... that can attract us [as] a viewer?” he asked.
Students have to be critical about the larger environment in which they receive information, to—ideally—burst out of their social media bubbles, he added.
Students pick up lateral reading quickly, but need to hone their skills
In 2022, a study by researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Education showed that high school students who received only six 50-minute lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to “spot questionable websites as they were before the instruction took place.”
Two modules into the digital civic inquiry course, middle schoolers at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School feel confident about their ability to spot fake information online and question its sources.
“When I used to scroll on social media, every single piece of information that I saw, I would automatically believe it. And I would judge, like, whether I believe it based off of the look of it,” said Kaitlyn Saunders, an 8th grader in Wattier’s class. “But now I can look at something, and I can be, like, this looks professional, but the information might not be true, or it might not be fact-checked, and I might want to check the sources before I go telling my family members and friends about it.”
A website would seem professional—and by extension, trustworthy—to Kaitlyn if the information in it was well-organized, if it had a color scheme, and if it linked to multiple other sites.
Kimore Philips, Caitlin’s classmate, said she’d learned to “question herself” when looking at videos or websites online: “Who made this? Are those people experts on the topic? Are they biased or promoting a business? Why should I trust them?”
The lessons have given students an easy way to conduct background research, said James Aument, another 8th grader in Wattier’s class who plans to talk to his family and friends about trusting information online.
The students emphasized the need to teach their parents to understand what’s real and fake. “They didn’t have AI, they didn’t have the types of cell phones and social media that we have now,” said Kaitlyn.
Teacher training is key
Wattier is happy with her students’ progress. They’ve grasped the idea of lateral reading, but they still need help to parse through biased and unbiased sources.
When Wattier asked them to find out if an environmental coalition was a credible source for an article that challenged research on global warming, students saw that it was a nonprofit advocacy organization and deemed it credible. “They missed that the group is made up of climate change denialists,” Wattier said.
As Wattier works through students’ own biases, she will introduce concepts like “click restraint,” the idea that websites pay to be placed at certain spots on Google, and how that can impact their credibility. By the end of the year, Wattier hopes students will be able to verify the credibility of sources they find on their own.
“These skills should translate to critically analyzing any media they consume, whether it’s for school or entertainment,” Wattier said.
Teachers, like other adults, can also lack the skills to do a credibility check on information they see online. A common mistake, said McGrew, is to think that a website with a .org or .edu domain will always give credible information.
The University of Maryland trainers will issue participating teachers a pre- and post-course survey to check to see if their evaluation skills get better, alongside their students’.
There are other skills being captured, too, said McGrew: “We’re interested in seeing if they facilitate deliberations in these classes better.”
Next year, McGrew hopes to increase the number of teachers who have been trained in this course to 50. Beyond that, she’ll rely on the educators who have gone through training to then serve as master trainers for other teachers in their schools.
“To the extent that there’s money available, hopefully, we’ll be able to more explicitly support teachers,” she said. “But I feel good that at least the teacher leader piece is there, and that there’ll be teachers across the city who are experts in teaching this.”
