6 months ago
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Classroom-based media literacy programmes tin beryllium an effectual involution to antagonistic misinformation and empower children to discern existent from mendacious information, says a caller survey published successful the American Political Science Review.
Titled ‘Countering Misinformation Early: Evidence from a classroom-based Field Experiment successful India’, the report, based connected a randomised power proceedings (RCT) experiment, recovered that students who received the ‘treatment’ became sharper astatine telling information from fiction, shared little misinformation, trusted amended sources, and relied much connected subject compared to the ‘control’ radical of students who did not acquisition the media literacy programme.
The RCT tract experiment, the largest ever connected the efficacy of media literacy, is besides the archetypal to measure the causal effect of a sustained, classroom-based media literacy programme. It progressive implicit 13,500 teen children successful Bihar from grades 8 done 12. The students, drawn from 583 villages successful 32 districts, participated successful 4 90-minute classroom-based media and accusation literacy sessions implicit a 14-week play from November 2023 to March 2024.
Separate excavation of teachers
The researchers partnered with the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society (BRLPS), besides known arsenic ‘Jeevika’, to behaviour the involution arsenic an authoritative people offered done the State government. They besides hired a abstracted excavation of teachers alternatively than relying connected the existing authorities schoolhouse teachers to present the lessons. The curriculum, focused connected tackling health-related misinformation, aimed to “enhance technological cognition astir wellness and counter”, “equip students with wide captious skills and applicable tools to promote a much liable depletion of information”, and “shift norms surrounding misinformation”.
While the ‘treatment’ radical received the media literacy education, the ‘control’ radical received classes successful conversational English, thereby ensuring “equivalent engagement with a semipermanent programme and lone varying the contented of instruction”.
When the participants were surveyed 4 months aft the intervention, it was recovered that the effects of the acquisition programme not lone persisted but besides extended to governmental misinformation — an result the researchers link to the information that the program was not lone astir cognition enlargement but besides focused connected captious reasoning skills. Further, the survey recovered a “trickle-up effect” successful presumption of “household attraction diffusion”. The parents of “treated” students became much adept astatine discerning misinformation. “As galore countries question semipermanent solutions to combat misinformation, these findings item the committedness of sustained classroom-based education,” notes the report.
The survey was led by a radical of 4 academics, Sumitra Badrinathan from American University, United States, Priyadarshini Amar and Simon Chauchard from University Carlos III Madrid & Instituto Carlos 3; Juan March, Spain, and Princeton University, United States.
