10 Reasons Why There is a Media and Information Literacy Crisis

According to a recent Education Week blog post by Stephen Sawchuck, “Students Are Really, Really Bad at Spotting Fake News, Misleading Websites.” No surprise there. But, just why do students continue to struggle to gain media and information literacy (MIL) skills? I can think of at least 10 reasons for this crisis:

1. Lack of certified school librarians. This is a no brainer. As the number of certified school librarians declines, we should expect a decline (or at least no gain) in students’ MIL skills.
2. Lack of institutional support. States and school districts need to put their money where their mouth is. Supporting ISTE, AASL, and related state standards is not equivalent to supporting the resources (human resources, materials, time) required to implement those standards into the curriculum.
3. Inadequate training (pre-service and professional). This happens at both the professional development level and the pre-service level. And a confounding factor is the lack of solid cross-disciplinary research on how MIL is best taught. While decent research can be found in the field of media studies (media literacy) and library and information science (information literacy), there needs to be a convergence of research that addresses ALL the factors that impact MIL learning, e.g., policies and processes, curriculum design, socio-cultural factors, cognitive processing, modes of thinking, reasoning development, attention and motivation, etc.
4. Poor teaching techniques. Surface teaching leads to surface thinking, and the checklist-style method of teaching just does not cut it when trying to develop the deeper reasoning skills required for MIL. This is largely a result of the lack of time set aside for teaching MIL. A better approach would be to embed MIL into everyday classroom activities.
5. Gaps in related literacies. Reading comprehension is a prerequisite of MIL, as is visual literacy (evaluating images, videos), algorithmic literacy (understanding search engines, social media), and digital literacy. To be sure, MIL also depends on strong multimodal literacy—the ability of students to navigate back and forth between the different modes of communication.
6. Limited opportunities for practice. Limited opportunities to practice comes from both limited opportunities to teach MIL in the classroom and limited opportunities for students to practice these skills at home. Feedback and reinforcement are vital to MIL skill development. In the school setting, this can be overcome by bringing MIL into the everyday classroom (both informally and formally). Parent education can help extend practice to the home environment.
7. Limited exposure to modeled behavior. When students are surrounded by MI-literate adults, they are more likely to become MI-literate themselves. Librarians, classroom teachers, and even administrators should strive to actively practice MIL behavior and point it out to students at every opportunity.
8. Students’ reasoning development. Reasoning development is rarely discussed in the context of MIL, but it should be. In high school, most adolescents are moving into the quasi-reflective stages of reasoning and have yet to fully understand how to use evidence to develop a conclusion. When uncertain, they still fall back on the knowledge of an authority (or who they perceive to be an authority).
9. Students’ personal beliefs (psychology). Like reasoning development, beliefs are not always considered in the discussion of teaching MIL. However, instinctive beliefs can be so strong as to overpower logical reasoning. Beliefs can also be segmented, where a student is able to critically reason in some situations but not others.
10. Students’ motivation. Motivation, of course, is a basic requirement for learning. Finding engaging and relevant contexts for teaching MIL can improve the motivation factor.