The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened people’s need for information as they adapt to changing and unpredictable societal conditions. This need and sense of urgency has been capitalised upon by some media outlets and social media users, leading to a rise of public misinformation and creating a massive “politics of fear” (Wodak, 2021). The rapidity of the spread of fake news, mis- and disinformation can have drastic consequences for vulnerable and stigmatised groups. Knowing how misrepresented and/or manipulative information is produced and consumed is therefore fundamental to human welfare and social cohesion. Yet, just as students today have access to an abundance of information, they are equally burdened with having to “navigate, select, interpret, relate, and communicate information available online and offline” (Bawden, 2008). Critical thinking and media literacy skills are therefore vital in the “post-truth” era in which anxieties abound and easy explanations are sought for complex problems (Buckingham, 2019; Lewandosky, Ecker & Cook, 2017). Furthermore, as Scheufele & Krause (2019) explain, “being misinformed is a function of a person’s ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increase the chances of citizens to be exposed to correct(ive) information”. Identifying misinformation thus depends on individual abilities and collective membership. Another issue is that misinformation encompasses a plethora of discursive phenomena, e.g. false information, polarised content, satire, misreporting, commentary, persuasive information, and citizen journalism (Molina, Shyam Sundar, Le & Lee, 2021), not always easy to distinguish and classify.

In this paper, we transfer these global concerns to educational research and teaching scenarios by drawing on and combining literature about the new information environment and new literacy practices. The concept of new literacy practices finds its way into education under the competence ‘critical literacy’, which denotes the ability to critically understand a text’s intention on different levels of meaning, as well as to question texts and other media (Elsner & Viebrock, 2013). We present the findings of a mixed-method investigation into student beliefs about and perceptions of items of misinformation presented on social media and online news platforms. The investigation forms part of a larger and longer-term research project that aims to develop pedagogical resources and guidelines for critical thinking and digital literacy at secondary school. We claim that, in order to develop the requisite critical thinking and digital literacy skills to identify misinformation online, we must start with a diagnostic of students’ own knowledge and perceptions. Such findings can then support the development of effective didactical and pedagogical procedures. 

Our findings derive from fieldwork conducted in January 2022 in secondary schools in Hamburg, Germany. Statistics show that 94% of German adolescents own a smartphone and that their time spent online rose during the COVID-19 pandemic (mpfs, 2021). This can be attributed to school closures and the introduction of online teaching/learning, but also to the internet “as a central everyday medium” through which to find information (ibid.: 72). Our research attempts to gain a more in-depth, qualitative perspective of students’ attitudes towards and experiences of media environments via a topic-focused investigation. This Hamburg-based study is also part of a larger Erasmus+ consortium with partners in the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. It is therefore conceived from a European perspective as the issues outlined above pertain to all societies as citizens are increasingly digitally connected, and education systems are faced with the challenges of a changing world.   

The research team/authors devised and conducted workshops on the topic of fake news and misinformation at five secondary schools in Hamburg. In order to determine extant knowledge and perceptions of such news items, ca. 200 students in grades 10-12 completed a questionnaire containing open and closed questions. Students were asked to briefly explain ‘fake news’ and to provide an example if possible, pointing out the characteristics that allowed them to identify it as false or misleading. They were further asked inter alia how frequently they came across misleading informational items online, which topics they concerned, and which groups are more likely to be affected by fake news. While their answers will inform us of their knowledge and perceptions, the questionnaire task also served to activate students’ thinking about the topic before being tasked with critically examining selected examples of misleading information from online news and social media platforms. The students were presented with five such examples, each of them linking the Corona virus with migrants or ‘foreigners’ and asked to discursively and multimodally interrogate one example in small working groups. The students then discussed the examples together in the larger group and, together with the researchers, compiled a list of identifying characteristics and strategies for identifying misinformation. The students’ interactions and reactions were observed by the workshop moderators, who recorded the workshop dynamics and photographed the students’ work on paper. Designed as an educational intervention, students completed a reflective task after the workshop in which they were to outline what they had learned. We quantitatively and qualitatively examine the pupils’ responses to the assigned tasks by: i) descriptive analysis of their answers to the closed questions in the questionnaire using the statistical software, SPSS; ii) triangulation of the quantitative findings with the derived data from open questions, reflections during group work, and the reflective task by adapting a content analysis approach (Mayring, 2000), i.e. by categorising the qualitative data which will allow us to deepen the quantitative results. We attempt to identify correlations between perceived contact with, critical evaluation of and learning about fake news.

Analyses are ongoing at the time of submission and are expected to be completed in Spring 2022. Applying the above methods we aim to identify and document: i) signs of critical thinking skills and digital literacy that students display in their answers and in the assigned task; ii) the individual and collective factors in perceptions of fake news consumption as well as learning about fake news; iii) the discursive phenomena, considering the typology by Molina, Shyam Sundar, Le & Lee (op. cit.), referred to by the students. Our quantitative analysis of the closed answers and the content analysis of the open questions, fake news evaluations and critical reflection task will allow us to address educational needs and new prospects for educational research in the field of digital literacy development. Our findings will directly inform the development of pedagogical resources that are being developed together with partners in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. In the near future, our findings will be compared with those of the same (but translated) questionnaire from research partners in these European countries. This will allow us to analyse differences and commonalities in the perceived presentation and consumption of fake news in different European contexts.

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