(Illustration by Miguel Porlan)
Can schoolchildren learn how to vet information they find online, and bring the lessons home to their families? A study of Indian schools found that a curriculum designed to equip students to fight health misinformation not only helped the kids tell what was true or false, but also benefited their households.
Online misinformation is a growing problem worldwide, as influencers, government-backed groups, and non-state actors flood social media with posts that can spark violence, help disease spread, and poison people against their neighbors. In India, rumors and accusations online have fanned the flames of deadly sectarian rage.
The study’s authors—Priyadarshi Amar, a postdoctoral research fellow in social sciences at University Carlos III of Madrid; Sumitra Badrinathan, an assistant professor of politics, governance, and economics at American University; Simon Chauchard, an associate professor of social sciences at University Carlos III; and Florian Sichart, a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University—conducted a field experiment in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. Working with the state government, they brought a four-month classroom curriculum to 13,500 teenagers in 583 village schools, teaching them how to evaluate health information.
“Treated respondents were significantly better at discerning true from false information, altered their health preferences, relied more on science, and reduced their dependence on unreliable news sources,” the authors report.
Returning to survey the teens four months later, the researchers found that they continued to use the skills they had developed and were able to extend their knowledge to false assertions about political topics. The study also showed that the students’ parents were more likely to spot misinformation as well, illustrating that the effects were disseminating through households.
The researchers drew their inspiration from a disconnect between the academic literature and the real world, Badrinathan says. While funding supports in-school programs to help children think critically about media, researchers are not studying how effective these protracted courses are. Instead, they are focused on measuring short-term interventions.
“We wanted to know whether a sustained, class-based program, the kind governments are actually rolling out, could meaningfully change how young people interpret information in a context where misinformation has real social and political consequences,” she says.
The most important takeaway from the study, according to Badrinathan, was that the curriculum benefitted from official government backing, which made parents want to send their children to the classes and nudged the students to take them seriously. The delivery model made a difference, she says.
In a surprising finding from the study, boys who had taken the course were more likely than girls to say they would speak up publicly against misinformation, even though boys and girls both showed improvement in their ability to tell true information from false. The researchers hypothesized that this difference is not because their female classmates were less interested or able, but because local gender expectations inhibited them.
“In many parts of the world, the social costs of speaking up are simply different for girls, and it was a reminder that improving knowledge and skills is one thing, while changing the space people have to act on them is another,” Badrinathan says.
“Even if almost forcing media literacy on students is an obvious solution, seeing that it actually works represents an important advance,” says John Marshall, an associate professor of political science at Columbia University, who added that he plans to assign the paper to his students learning about interventions to combat misinformation.
Fighting misinformation is difficult, whether it’s getting people to agree to undergo media-literacy training in advance, convincing social-media platforms to incorporate tools to help users understand what’s true, or refuting specific claims, Marshall says. The study moves the field forward by proving the usefulness of in-school training for media literacy, which has, according to him, “the greatest potential I’ve seen to combat misinformation—not just immediately but also against future waves of misinformation to come.”
Two future concerns arise from the study, according to Marshall: convincing governments to institute the curriculum in schools even if politicians themselves generate or benefit from misinformation, and finding a way to teach these lessons to adults no longer in school.
The next step in the research, Badrinathan says, is a follow-on study in Brazilian public schools, comparing two models for teaching media literacy to students: “This project helps us move beyond the question of ‘Do media literacy programs work?’ toward a more nuanced question: ‘When they work, why—and what kind of pedagogy makes them most effective?’”
Find the full study: “Countering Misinformation Early: Evidence from a Classroom-Based Field Experiment in India” by Priyadarshi Amar, Sumitra Badrinathan, Simon Chauchard, and Florian Sichart, American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.