How Countries Around the World Support News Literacy

News Literacy Week is coming up, and for the United States, it couldn’t come at a better time (January 23-27). By many measures, partisan political strife is at record highs, and growing. Trust in the media is “near record lows” with only 7 percent of people in the U.S. reporting “a great deal” of trust and 27 percent reporting “a fair amount” of trust. Behind the eponymous week is the News Literacy Project (NLP), a U.S.-based bipartisan nonprofit organization that supports news literacy in schools and for the general public. In the words of NLP’s CEO, “Mis- and disinformation threaten American democracy, but a better-informed, civically engaged public can act as a potent bulwark against that threat.”

We know from research that this kind of education needs to begin early. Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories starts around age 14. Obviously, we can’t wait to do media training until people are all grown up, especially in these divided times.

A Glimmer of Hope: Finland

Fortunately, News Literacy Week arrives at a time when there are some glimmers of hope for change. First, Finland’s model is getting fresh press. We previously wrote about an educational model developed in Finland that teaches students as young as primary school to question sources and suss out misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. The Finnish model was launched in 2014, when Russian disinformation became increasingly widespread in Finland. But its groundbreaking methods and documented successes have increasingly been recognized, including just last week in The New York Times. Finland has since pushed beyond its student programs, now implementing programs in libraries to teach older people these same media literacy skills.

A Glimmer of Hope: Uganda

As we wrote previously, Finland’s success doesn’t seem to be due solely to its relative prosperity. Research in Uganda, using the gold standard, randomized controlled trials, found similar results. Ugandan teachers participated in two days of training, after which they presented a series of nine lessons on information literacy (related to health outcomes) to children between 10 and 12 years old. The researchers found a “large improvement” in information literacy following this intervention, concluding that, “it is possible to teach primary school children to think critically in schools with large student-to-teacher ratios and few resources.”

Polina Tankilevitch/Pexels

A Glimmer of Hope: New Jersey

On January 4, 2023, New Jersey’s governor signed a law mandating information literacy in the classroom. The first U.S. state to have such a mandate, New Jersey passed this law with overwhelmingly bipartisan support. The Republican state senator, Mike Testa, who was the lead sponsor of the New Jersey senate version of the bill said that the law was intended to increase the ability of students to “weigh the flood of news, opinion, and social media they are exposed to both online and off.” He was clear that the law was not about indoctrination. “This law isn’t about teaching kids that any specific idea is true or false. Rather, it’s about helping them learn how to research, evaluate, and understand the information they are presented for themselves.”

One of the driving forces behind the new law is Olga Polites, a professor at New Jersey’s Rowan University. Polites routinely encouraged her students to seek “reputable sources across the ideological spectrum,” but realized that they need additional skills—in particular, to move beyond the basic Google searches that too often lead to biased information or material lacking sources. Referencing both the deepening partisan divide in the U.S. and the new law in New Jersey, Polites said, “Giving students skills to critically think through these issues could not have occurred at a better time.”

In New Jersey, the curriculum soon will include lessons on how research is conducted, how to think critically about all kinds of information, how to access and think about peer-reviewed resources (in our opinion, it’s exciting that the curriculum will include such sophisticated training not often endeavored prior to university), the difference between factual reporting and opinions, and the ethical, legal, and social issues related to producing and reporting information.

And did we mention that this was law was passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support? (Yes. Yes, we did. But it bears repeating that bipartisan collaborations for the good of all are possible.)

A Glimmer of Hope: You

As New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy signed this bill into law, he said, “It is our responsibility to ensure our nation’s future leaders are equipped with the tools necessary to identify fact from fiction.” Of course, we would argue that it’s all of our responsibilities. And News Literacy Week offers an opportunity to figure out how you might contribute to this timely and even dire responsibility—to promote tactics for identifying and fighting misinformation and its even more evil variants, disinformation and malinformation.

We encourage you to learn more about News Literacy Week. Check out ideas aimed not only at educators and students, but at all of us, the so-called general public. There are lots of great options, but, as fans of psychological science, may we suggest a panel called “Your Brain and Misinformation: Why People Believe Lies and Conspiracy Theories”? If you’re reading this too late for News Literacy Week, you can still check out their website for ideas on how to help the cause. (We promise that we have no connection whatsoever to this organization. We’re just fans!)