Information Literacy

Illustration by Martín Elfman for The Chronicle

When David Oxtoby said in a 2011 speech that “facts matter,” the president of Pomona College could not have known that “post-truth” would be the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2016.

Teaching students to separate fact from fiction has become a priority after an election in which false “news” played a large role. Fabricated stories like the one that claimed prominent Democrats were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop in the nation’s capital have drawn alarm. So has the undocumented claim by President Donald J. Trump — called a lie by The New York Times — that illegal immigrants had cost him the popular vote.

Fraudulent claims and biased news predate the internet, of course, and were often associated with talk radio in the past. But in recent months the issue has taken on greater urgency for many academics, who are asking: Can students tease fact from fiction, online or anywhere else?

A report released in November by Stanford University researchers found a dispiriting answer. Many students, the researchers found, had trouble identifying partisan or paid-for content online and assessing the credibility of sources.

The ability to find, evaluate, and use information — a skill set often called information literacy — is traditionally taught by English-composition professors or college librarians. In a single session or throughout a semester-long course, they acquaint students with an institution’s research offerings and teach them to search, analyze, and cite information responsibly. The need for literacy, many point out, applies not just to citations and bibliographies but also to how students digest information and news of all types.

Instructors have already made strides in adapting information literacy to the internet age. But to some, an increasingly complex online landscape and the blurred line between producers and consumers of news and other content require a new kind of literacy and a greater commitment of campus resources to teach.

Trudi E. Jacobson, head of information literacy and a librarian at the University at Albany, says such competency is often just given lip service. “The librarian is invited in for one class session, and it’s like, We’ve taken care of it for the students,” she says.

At Albany, which is part of the State University of New York system, every department has been responsible since 2014 for teaching information literacy. Ms. Jacobson worked with faculty members to bring the subject into discipline-specific courses, and she helped create online exercises about “metaliteracy” — an extension of information literacy that recognizes students’ roles as both creators and consumers of online content. Students can earn digital badges for completing the activities.

Faculty members play an important role in teaching students to critically engage with information, especially on the web, Ms. Jacobson says. While a professor or librarian may initiate information-literacy efforts, the work must be diffused throughout the curriculum so students can build up skills over time, she says.

That can be a challenge, since faculty members are already pressed for time to cover course material. And some may be less comfortable with digital tools than their students are, or view such skills as ancillary to those needed for an academic assignment, says Kris Shaffer, an instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington.

A month after the election, Mr. Shaffer published an article calling for a new kind of literacy, one that merges a traditional emphasis on critical thinking with technical know-how. Students and faculty members, he says, also need to understand social-media pitfalls, search-engine rankings, and the way in which algorithms cull and conceal content. “Help awaken your students to these new practices of digital deception, and help them face them effectively,” he wrote. The necessary literacy “is more than traditional information literacy applied to digital media,” and more than just technical knowledge.

Many librarians and professors have put out responses or guides like Mr. Shaffer’s in the past few months. Joyce Valenza, an assistant teaching professor at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, for example, created a “news-literacy tool kit” a few weeks after the election. It defines terms like “virality” and “herding phenomenon” (the tendency for news reports to mirror one another), and includes some recommendations. For example: Scrutinize a website’s URL; its ‘About’ page; any sensational language; and its images, which can be manipulated or taken out of context. “We are seeing things that are new,” Ms. Valenza says, like native advertisements (paid-for content designed to blend in with other content produced by an outlet) and content farms (producers of material designed to take advantage of search-engine or social-media algorithms, often for advertising revenue).

Ms. Valenza has found that requiring students to compile annotated source lists when working on a paper or research project can be particularly helpful in getting them to think about the credibility of sources and their reasons for selecting those sources. Other professors ask students to analyze news coverage and provide questions to guide their thinking about bias and other factors.

Students and educators alike can introduce these practical suggestions into the classroom with little legwork. But information literacy can’t be taught in a purely skills-based way, Ms. Jacobson says. While technical chops are needed, the internet changes so rapidly that rigid rules on what sites are credible are frequently made moot. Students instead need to develop the attitude that all information must be examined critically, she says.

Indeed, locating and verifying information is just half the battle. To many faculty members, teaching students to analyze information is the heavier lift.

Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, is a principal researcher for a multi-institution study that found that students often regurgitate text without demonstrating an understanding of it. The study, called the Citation Project, found that students’ academic papers were often a kind of information dump, she says — quotes sewn together with little analysis.

Students need to analyze information, not just collect it, Ms. Howard says. They should be “formulating a hypothesis and looking at all the different perspectives of it.” The ability to gather information, examine multiple perspectives, and then re-evaluate prior beliefs, she says, must be reinforced across the curriculum. It’s a skill necessary for civic life as well.

While such a skill is labor-intensive to teach, “the value of a college education plummets” if students graduate unable to think critically or use information responsibly, Ms. Howard says. She plans to add lessons on fake news to all of the courses she teaches.

“I just feel a greater and greater sense of urgency,” she says, “for teaching students how to be critics of sources.”

Shannon Najmabadi writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality.