Anyone who has a tween or teen in their life—or has come across one of them in the wild—can attest that middle and high school students love their mobile devices. Forty-six percent of U.S. teens say they are online “almost constantly,” according to a 2023 study from the Pew Research Center. Many of those kids spend much of their screen time engaging with social media. On average, teens in the U.S. spend 4.8 hours per day on social media platforms including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, according to a 2023 Gallup survey. Parents and educators share numerous concerns about this reality, including potential links between social media use and declining adolescent mental health. And in today’s complicated digital media landscape, where social media has a starring role and generative AI is on the rise, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories abound, causing confusion and even harm. Librarians are—and always have been—helping students to better traverse this tricky terrain by teaching information literacy and its close relatives, media literacy and news literacy. That job has become more challenging and important than ever.
“I define ‘information literacy’ as the knowledge and skills needed to ethically and successfully navigate the information environment,” says Steve Tetreault, a school library media specialist in Holmdel, N.J. “We are living in an information world. We’ve got an information economy, and we literally have money now that is made of information, cryptocurrency. If our goal is to prepare students to be part of the world, information literacy has to be part of that instruction.” Tetreault posits that “apart from reading and math, information literacy is the most important skill we can teach our students, and it’s a cross-curricular topic that can be touched on in every subject.”
But many teachers are not familiar with information literacy. The term is often misunderstood and frequently gets conflated with both media literacy and news literacy. “Media literacy is learning to critically and effectively analyze the messages and news students encounter,” says Tara Nattrass, managing director of innovation strategy at ISTE + ACSD, the International Society for Technology in Education and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, two merged nonprofits providing professional development for educators. “It includes understanding how media messages are constructed and recognizing their influence.”
And according to Brittney Smith, senior manager of district partnerships at the nonpartisan nonprofit News Literacy Project, in general terms, “news literacy deals with teaching students how to find credible sources and how to determine what information they should trust.” Additionally, NLP emphasizes that news literacy helps students understand the role that credible information and a free press play in their own lives as well as in a healthy democracy.
Though the definitions of these literacies may be nuanced, Nattrass points out that “mastering these skills is critical for students to thrive in today’s digital age, where informed decision-making, ethical behavior, and critical thinking are essential.” She notes that all three literacies taken together, along with digital literacy, serve as a core guide for students, helping them “navigate the complexities of digital environments and equipping them to analyze information, engage responsibly, and contribute meaningfully to their communities.” Armed with this body of knowledge, Nattrass adds that “students become empowered to shape a more inclusive digital and physical world.”
The Frontliners
Brittney Smith
“We recognize that misinformation has caused a serious threat to our democracy. Teaching students
how to evaluate information gives them the skills they need to play an active role in our democracy.”
Steve Tetreault
“The younger we can get students thinking about information literacy, the better it is. But we need to be hitting it all the time, every year, at every grade level.”
Tara Nattrass
“Media literacy is learning to critically and effectively analyze the messages and news students encounter.”
The future is now
The push to provide formal information literacy education for K–12 students got a big boost in 2014 when the Future Ready Initiative launched during the White House ConnectED to the Future Convening, in partnership with the policy and advocacy organization Alliance
for Excellent Education. At that event, more than 100 school district superintendents from around the country—meeting with then-president Barack Obama, Education secretary Arne Duncan, and leaders from the U.S. Department of Education—signed a pledge committing to “work collaboratively with key district stakeholders to set a vision for digital learning, to empower educators through personalized professional learning, and to mentor other district leaders in their own transition to digital learning.”
The Future Ready movement expanded in 2016 to include a Future Ready Librarians Framework outlining librarians’ role in the mission to give students access to effective technology and quality teaching, with organizations including Follett School Solutions and ISTE providing funding and professional development support. And in 2018, the American Association of School Librarians aligned its standards with the ISTE Standards for Learners and Educators and the Future Ready Framework, supplying school librarians with additional guidelines and best practices for teaching information literacy and related topics.
In recent years, as students’ lives have become more intertwined with digital technology and political and cultural divides have deepened, the need for information literacy, media literacy, and news literacy has become more urgent. Postmortems of the 2024 presidential election have turned a spotlight on numerous issues, notably how and where Americans consume media and news and how they are influenced by it. “There are people who are getting a lot of information from sources that are not very reliable or accurate,” Tetreault says. “And when you say, ‘Here is a source that is not very trustworthy,’ if people are getting their information from that source, they can get very emotional about that. And I completely understand getting upset if somebody says that the thing you like is no good.”
He believes that a different, less emotional approach is most effective. “If we say, ‘Here are the things that any person should look for from any news source or information source,’ and we’re able to make it more objective rather than subjective, people tend to agree that, yes, these are things we should be looking for in sources of information and that the basic skills are absolutely things that we should be helping students understand.”
For Smith, the dangers that can stem from a lack of news literacy feel particularly close. “We recognize that misinformation has caused a serious threat to our democracy,” she says. “And we feel that teaching students how to evaluate information, the focus on the education piece itself, gives them the skills they need to feel empowered to create change and play an active role in our democracy.” As part of that goal, NLP surveyed 1,110 13- to 18-year-olds from across the country to learn more about teens’ information attitudes, habits, and skills. The results were released in October in the first-ever “News Literacy in America” report.
Among the findings: only 18% of surveyed teens were able to correctly distinguish between such information types as news, opinion, and advertisement. Forty-five percent of teens responded that professional journalists and the organizations they work for do more to harm democracy than to protect it; only 8% of teens said they had high trust in news media. And eight in 10 teens reported that they see conspiracy theories on social media, with 81% of the teens encountering conspiracy theories on social media saying they are likely to believe at least one of them.
In terms of formal news literacy education, the 2023 Media Literacy Policy Report from nonprofit Media Literacy Now indicates that 19 states have taken legislative action to prioritize media literacy (including news literacy) as a core element of K–12 education. But the NLP report found that of those 19, only nine states have included language that covers news literacy, and just three of those nine states (Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey) require that news literacy be included in some classrooms.
In January 2023, New Jersey became the first state to pass legislation requiring K–12 instruction on information literacy. Tetreault was selected as part of a group of 60–70 educators and school librarians from across disciplines and grade levels to work on the project over the summer of 2024. “I worked on the middle school information literacy writing drafting group and got to help come up with a first version of what we think this should be,” Tetreault says. “It was challenging, but it was really great to get all these different perspectives and be able to home in on some key elements as we went through it all.” The standards are expected to move into a public comment phase soon.
“The younger we can get students thinking about these things, the better it is,” Tetreault says. “But we need to be hitting it all the time, every year, at every grade level.” Early on, for example, lessons can be something as basic as determining where a piece of information came from and how to identify its source. “A lot of students will say, ‘Well, Google said...,’ ” he notes. “Well, no, Google pulls information from other places.” And with the advent of AI, he notes, “things have definitely gotten more confusing rather than less in the past couple of years.”
A shortage of school librarians—who are trained to teach information literacy—and of school libraries does not help. And Tetreault admits that adding information literacy to a teacher’s lesson plans does require that they do a little more work. But it does not have to be onerous. On Tetreault’s middle school turf, he finds that conversation is always key. “It’s an easy starting point and can come up in really any class when kids are sharing information,” he says. “You can just ask, ‘Where did you hear that?’ or, ‘How do you know that that’s true?’ It helps them start thinking about the sources that they’re referencing. Taking an extra five minutes to have a conversation will vastly improve students’ understanding of information and how they interact with it.”
Looking ahead, librarians and educators can find support and resources, including robust professional development and classroom ready lessons, from AASL, Common Sense Media, ISTE + ASCD, Media Literacy Now, and the NLP, among others. Smith at NLP cites a hopeful note in her organization’s latest research: “One of the most inspiring things about the study is that students want news literacy training,” she says. In fact, 94% of teens surveyed believe that media literacy should be a required subject taught in schools.
Tetreault sees a bright side as well. “Kids are aware that they don’t know everything there is to know about this, and they are willing to get some instruction and listen, which is great, because if the students are resistant to it, you’re dead before you even start,” he says. For next steps, “It’s mostly a matter of just helping people to understand that this is a topic that needs to be addressed. And hopefully we can get administrators and school boards thinking about the fact that we should have a professional who knows how to do this in our schools and offer that assistance to the teachers as much as possible.”
Creating Digital Citizens
“At ISTE + ASCD, teaching digital well-being isn’t about listing ‘don’ts,’ ” according to Tara Nattrass, managing director of innovation strategy for the organizations. “Instead, it emphasizes ‘dos’ by modeling and practicing skills that empower young people to be thoughtful, empathetic digital citizens.” To that end, in 2019, ISTE teamed up with a diverse group of education, media, and tech organizations to form the Digital Citizenship Commitment campaign, with a goal of redefining digital citizenship and providing educators with the necessary tools to teach the newly defined discipline.
Together, founding members of this Digital Citizenship Coalition, including Common Sense Education, Google, KQED, and Los Angeles Unified School District, developed the five competencies of digital citizenship, via DigCitCommit.org:
Balanced: Students participate in a healthy variety of online activities and know how to prioritize their time between virtual and physical activities.
Informed: Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, and validity of digital media and develop critical skills for curating information from digital sources.
Inclusive: Students are open to hearing and recognizing different viewpoints and engaging with others online with respect and empathy.
Engaged: Students use technology and digital channels to solve problems and be a force for good in their families and communities.
Alert: Students are aware of their digital actions and know how to be safe and create safe spaces for others online.
Additional resources for educators, including videos, printed materials, and a 15-hour self-paced online course Digital Citizenship in Action from ISTE U, can be found on the Digital Citizenship in Education page on ISTE’s website.
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