Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age

By Joseph Kahne, Benjamin T. Bowyer. 2017

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article investigates youth judgments of the accuracy of truth claims tied to controversial public issues. In an experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey of youth ages 15 to 27 (N = 2,101), youth were asked to judge the accuracy of one of several simulated online posts. Consistent with research on motivated reasoning, youth assessments depended on (a) the alignment of the claim with one’s prior policy position and to a lesser extent on (b) whether the post included an inaccurate statement. To consider ways educators might improve judgments of accuracy, we also investigated the influence of political knowledge and exposure to media literacy education. We found that political knowledge did not improve judgments of accuracy but that media literacy education did.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0b9c4977f12daa7af4407604bfb0fa2e9d78a28

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Citations in the corpus

Can Students Evaluate Online Sources? Learning From Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning (2018, background): “In fact, evidence suggests that explicit instruction may help students develop a commitment to accuracy in online evaluations (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017).”
Conferring Resistance to Digital Disinformation: The Inoculating Influence of Procedural News Knowledge (2019, unknown): “…higher levels of news media literacy know more about current events (Ashley, Maksl, & Craft, 2017) and are better able to critically evaluate news content (Vraga & Tully, 2016), as well as correctly judge the accuracy of online political posts (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017), than those lower in literacy.”
Creating News Literacy Messages to Enhance Expert Corrections of Misinformation on Twitter (2020, background): “…to limit susceptibility to misinformation, little research has tested whether media literacy messages designed to prompt critical processing of news and information interact with misinformation and its correction on social media (Clayton et al., 2019; Craft et al., 2017; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017).”
A review of educational responses to the “post-truth” condition: Four lenses on “post-truth” problems (2020, background): “Indeed, students who receive media literacy instruction are more likely to distinguish between evidence-based information and misinformation (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017).”
Fact-Checking: A Meta-Analysis of What Works and for Whom (2019, background): “Motivated reasoning is a dominant theory used to explain the formation and resiliency of political misperceptions (Druckman, 2012; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017).”