, ENG1503 Assignment 1 (COMPLETE ANSWERS) Semester 1
2025 (769162) - DUE 24 March 2025
Teaching Information Literacy in an Age of Misinformation Krista
Black, EdD February 28, 2024 The first time I encountered a student
who “just didn’t believe” the data I was using in my sociology class, it
caught me off guard. I don’t recall exactly how I responded in the
moment, but with the benefit of hindsight I now know it was a tremor in
what would become a seismic shift in our educational landscape.
Students who are in their late teens or early twenties have spent their
educational experiences navigating misinformation, fake news, and
alternative facts. I didn’t realize until my student made the comment
above on how the broader shift in our society toward scientific
skepticism would bear out in the classroom. This unexpected moment in
the classroom alerted me to an opportunity to explore and expand the
scope of information literacy skills I incorporate in my courses. I had
started integrating information literacy skills into my sociology classes
with a narrow focus that built on research method topics that were
appropriate for an introductory course. We talked about interpreting
statistics like percent change, visual representations of data, survey
design, and sampling. My goal was to support both students’ learning of
sociology in the course and their broader consumption of information
outside of the classroom. As we worked through information literacy
lessons in class, I gained insights into how students access and process
information in their day-to-day lives. My students reported getting their
news from social media, news apps, television news, and friends and
family members. They are aware of mis- and disinformation, the fact
that social media is designed to be attention-grabbing, and that not all
sources are reliable. This, from my perspective, is a good thing.
What I see as a challenge that we as educators must grapple with, is our
students’ selective desire to apply these misgivings towards not just all
information, but particularly those sources of information that clash with
their preferred vision for how things “should” be (i.e., motivated
reasoning). Through this process of teaching, getting student feedback,
and revising my materials, I learned that my initial information literacy
2025 (769162) - DUE 24 March 2025
Teaching Information Literacy in an Age of Misinformation Krista
Black, EdD February 28, 2024 The first time I encountered a student
who “just didn’t believe” the data I was using in my sociology class, it
caught me off guard. I don’t recall exactly how I responded in the
moment, but with the benefit of hindsight I now know it was a tremor in
what would become a seismic shift in our educational landscape.
Students who are in their late teens or early twenties have spent their
educational experiences navigating misinformation, fake news, and
alternative facts. I didn’t realize until my student made the comment
above on how the broader shift in our society toward scientific
skepticism would bear out in the classroom. This unexpected moment in
the classroom alerted me to an opportunity to explore and expand the
scope of information literacy skills I incorporate in my courses. I had
started integrating information literacy skills into my sociology classes
with a narrow focus that built on research method topics that were
appropriate for an introductory course. We talked about interpreting
statistics like percent change, visual representations of data, survey
design, and sampling. My goal was to support both students’ learning of
sociology in the course and their broader consumption of information
outside of the classroom. As we worked through information literacy
lessons in class, I gained insights into how students access and process
information in their day-to-day lives. My students reported getting their
news from social media, news apps, television news, and friends and
family members. They are aware of mis- and disinformation, the fact
that social media is designed to be attention-grabbing, and that not all
sources are reliable. This, from my perspective, is a good thing.
What I see as a challenge that we as educators must grapple with, is our
students’ selective desire to apply these misgivings towards not just all
information, but particularly those sources of information that clash with
their preferred vision for how things “should” be (i.e., motivated
reasoning). Through this process of teaching, getting student feedback,
and revising my materials, I learned that my initial information literacy
