I’m sure this will vary for many people depending on their schools, where/when they were taught, and the like, so I’m interested to see what others’ experiences have been with this.
I’m also curious about what resources some have used to learn better research skills & media literacy (and found useful) if their school didn’t adequately teach either (or they may have whiffed on it at the time).
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Yes in the 2000s on primary school we were taught about search engines and the internet. Our classes covered how to find information, types of searches and to be skeptical of information sources. Intermediate and high-school taught everything on the internet was wrong and not to use it.
After ~7 years of book reports and essays I’d hope you’d run across at least one teacher that taught you the basics of how to reference things and not plagiarise – where I grew up.
Qwerty
I’m over 40 and while I was taught to do research on a Microfische, I was regularly told not to trust anything on the internet.
As for media literacy, no way in hell. Especially after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 started allowing mass consolidation of media empires. In the 1980’s, majority of US media was owned by around 80 companies, in the modern era, it’s five that own the majority of the US media landscape.
You say the name “Marshall McLuhan” or even “the medium is the message” and you get confused fucking looks.
Eh, they certainly tried to teach it, but teachers were scared to give assignments that required information they didn’t provide ahead of time.
So, there was never a need to actually apply it, to realize that, hey, if I don’t know something, I should absolutely crack open the internet and read up on whatever I can find.Only the absolute basics.
Random American here. Research skills? Yes, definitely. My high school had access to a couple of the major academic publication databases, so we definitely learned the fundamentals. So many essays.
Media literacy? Nope, not in the slightest. Would’ve been nice though.
I think we’re severely lacking in media literacy, financial literacy, and civics in general. A whole generation with a strong background in those things at an early age would do wonders for society.
My high school had access to a couple of the major academic publication databases, so we definitely learned the fundamentals.
Was this a public high school? I ask as I know many academic publication databases tend to have notorious costs associated with them, albeit maybe they’re more relaxed than I had realized for schools.
Yeah, it was public. This was a while back though, more than two decades ago, so it was the relatively early days of those big online databases. I vaguely remember my school being part of some early trial, though I could be pulling that out of nowhere.
We took those classes. They were very introductory though (how to cite, what are good sources, how to write a research paper, history of media, some basic media theories, etc).
Yes, but not enough that you couldn’t ignore, fail to understand, or miss it.
So I’m going to say no but in a way different from others here.
Technical details like libraries, even search engines, sources, quoting and citing … sure, these were at least touched on if not covered well enough.
But as someone who has gone on to do actual research at an academic level, I’d say the essential challenge of the task wasn’t even touched. Which is getting to the bottom of a question or field, exploring the material on said topic and then digesting and synthesising all of that. Some may hit this in undergrad depending on the degree, and it’s tricky work to do well and at an advanced level.
From what I’ve seen, the ideas and techniques required aren’t covered early on at all. Now it may be rather challenging at an early educational level, but I’d bet you it’s possible but undesirable because it’s hard to grade and takes a long time.
Thing is, I’d suspect trying to get practiced at that kind of work would actually be beneficial. You start to get insight into what it means to know things and to work things out. What it means to ask questions that aren’t common or not immediately answerable by Wikipedia (I recall realising in my masters that Wikipedia no longer had any utility for my research, like at all) and how there are different domains and sources and levels and techniques of both knowledge and uncertainty and mystery. Whether a young student is good at this or gets far at it, trying it for a bit and seeing the process could be valuable for everyone.
But as someone who has gone on to do actual research at an academic level, I’d say the essential challenge of the task wasn’t even touched. Which is getting to the bottom of a question or field, exploring the material on said topic and then digesting and synthesising all of that. Some may hit this in undergrad depending on the degree, and it’s tricky work to do well and at an advanced level.
From what I’ve seen, the ideas and techniques required aren’t covered early on at all. Now it may be rather challenging at an early educational level, but I’d bet you it’s possible but undesirable because it’s hard to grade and takes a long time.
Without having gone on to do actual research, but with at least undergrad completed, I’m inclined to agree. Despite having completed undergrad, even it left me wondering a fair amount how much I’d just been a terrible student or how much my education had somehow managed to sort of gloss over or speed over rather critical research skills to develop.
Sure, I knew how to search for info and kind of weigh the sources, as some others have noted, but the more involved work like you describe? Not so much, and I’m fairly confident it was as much to do with the curriculum as it was to do with the limited time each class/course had to work with (plus accounting for the fact you’d also be muddling through multiple other classes/courses), which wouldn’t necessarily even permit for assignments that would have one digging in and really researching thoroughly.
Yep, agree, and had the same feeling through undergrad.
If it helps, I’ve had the same feeling through post-grad too! The whole world is on timelines and productivity goals these days … no one is allowed the time to just explore and see where things take them.
The recent Nobel Prize for medicine (for the mRNA vaccine) being a fairly glaring indictment of how much it has maybe taken academia off course. For example, here’s a psychology professor trying to address the issue on mastodon. Another example I noticed was that any older paper I’d read, though the technology and understanding (in some cases) was obviously older and less advanced, would obviously be of a better quality compared to modern papers. The main difference was that older papers were more likely to report on the story of an investigation. There’s be assides about things they’d checked or doubts they’d had etc. Modern papers tend to lean more into “marketing” and feel more rushed and manufactured. Any colleague in similar areas to me that I’ve spoken about this has shared similar feelings. Academics are pressured to publish at nearly a breakneck speed and none of them like it. Not because it’s got them working hard (though it does have that effect through secondary affects because of just how many things academics have to do to keep the system running, including peer-review), but because they aren’t allowed to work as hard as they’d like on solving problems and actually finishing projects.
Back to the topic of education … yea I agree that curriculum and its modularity is a big part of the problem. Bottom line is, along with the above, education is manufactured now, not cultured. Allowing a student to try and inevitably fail and struggle at actual research and asking their own or at least not spoon fed questions doesn’t fit neatly into the current design philosophy of education.
Thing is, I’m not sure there is much more of a point to education than allowing and helping someone learn and experience this process. It’s as simple as the “teach a man to fish” aphorism. All of the assessment and metrics driven design of education and curriculum to make sure someone is capable of knowing something for a short window of time is a rather superficial view of what being educated is about. With AI, chatGPT etc, the specter haunting academia and the hollowness of its value proposition is looming very large IMO, but few who are around academia or who genuinely found it valuable or value it as part of the self-worth want to question it.
Yes. In highschool (Australia) I took Modern History in years 11-12, which was taught by a teacher who really cared about the subject. With a subject like that of course media literacy, arguments, hypothesis’s, source accuracy, claims, bias, and everything related to research skills was relevant. It was essentially a practice run for any political science course you would take at university, as the class revolved around submitting one big assessment item each term which was thoroughly researched. I chose the easy route every time and just wrote essays, but if you were the creative type you could make something else to showcase understanding.
During one semester we did a small trip to a university campus in the city so we could gather resources for one of our projects while not hitting any paywalls.
Of course being an elective senior subject in rural Queensland it was only about 15 of us in my class, where my cohort at large was 100 students in total (once people dropped out in Year 10).
One teacher literally showed us how to use Libgen and SciHub for our research. Media literacy no.
We were taught basic research skills all throughout highschool, how to find information, how to read and write academic papers and how to cite things properly.
As far as media literacy goes, but our social studies classes always opened with a discussion about the day’s news stories as well as the bias of the source it came from.
But I think the class that really opened my eyes the most was a unit in 9th grade English where we discussed the language of advertising. In that class they taught us how anything you see in an ad has to be technically correct as to not run afowl of false advertising laws, but is very often misleading. After that, I started to spot those techniques everywhere, and not just in ads. Those few weeks were foundational to the way I approach critical thought now.
I’m in my mid 40s, high school in Missouri. I wouldn’t say they taught media literacy, and despite having a computer lab with the internet, it wasn’t considered.
Research was finding sources to cite for a paper and was a big chunk of the grade in English one year. They did cover what were considered reputable sources, but that meant published non-fiction, news reports, and maybe firsthand accounts (consider the source reputation). They seemed to assume we knew the difference between, say, a real newspaper and a tabloid, or the difference between Channel 5 News and Jerry Springer. The idea that the NY Times or Channel 5 News might have bias in how they presented things, and in what they chose to present, wasn’t considered at all.
Since this was taught in English, it was much more about using proper citations, not full plagiarism, and writing persuasively. I know I couldn’t find enough actual books on my topic in the school or public libraries, so I padded my reference list with the list the encyclopedia used. It worked fine.
To be fair, I do still use questions i learned from that research paper to evaluate info. am I seeing the same info across multiple sources, including high quality ones? can I trace it to an original source, and how much do I trust that source? can I find several high quality, independent sources for a particular thing?
Your last paragraph is such an important one. One of the things I see most is people citing a source, but then the sources their source cites may be dubious at best. It’s so important to be able to keep going backwards in sourcing. Where did every little piece of information come from? Humans make mistakes, sometimes data can get misunderstood or corrupted over time. A mistake in the past may result in printing a falsehood that’s generally accepted as true in the future. People often struggle following a path of information gathering beyond the first few steps. I do think that traces back to, like you said, we were taught what were reputable sources (NYT vs National Enquirer) but never given any knowledge that their might be bias even in our trusted sources. So many people, instead of considering where the information is sourced when it comes to outlets with a “reputable” history, just stop at “it was in the New York Times” as if they haven’t had their share of scandals (like when they sat on information the Bush admin was illegally spying on US citizens for over a year at the request of the Bush admin).
I think, unfortunately, it’s also why some people turn to really ridiculous sources, because they’re just smart enough to see the bias in legacy institutions, but they don’t have the media literacy to accept what they can research as true from legacy media but also to be skeptical and looking for evidence for what is presented, instead of treating is as fact. This, I think, has fueled the rise in conspiracy theories, from people who know everyone is lying to them, but lack the ability to be able to parse or deal with that in any healthy way. Yes, there is a lot of bias in legacy media, but turning to online media grifters who are selling you survival kits isn’t the healthy or literate solution.
I think there’s a human bias towards certainty, to believing in true facts. research is work, and when it undermines personal certainty, there’s an urge to just go with whoever does seem to be most certain. if you can’t be sure of the facts on a personal level, go with the guy who is loudest and most certain. and because people seeking to relay truth will make room for doubt, conspiracy theory guy wins.
understanding probability helps here - if 90% of climatologists are 90% sure of climate change, their doubt doesn’t make climate hoax guy right. the podcast 538 covers politics, but goes into polling theory, statistics, and probability in ways that make it easier for me to understand and apply in other areas.
