Approaches to Media and Information Literacy Instruction in K12 Education

Abstract

Educators have been urged to incorporate media literacy skills into curriculum to address mis/disinformation and the impact of emergent and established online features such as social media algorithms and generative AI on evaluating and using information. The scope of the research emphasizes mis/disinformation and K12 instruction, focusing on two questions: How are people addressing concerns around algorithms and AI? and, How are people integrating media literacy into content area instruction? Preliminary findings indicate that media literacy is often on the functional or superficial level. For example, the focus for AI literacy is on prompt engineering and ethical citation, not the deeper level of AI literacy such as being able to evaluate AI tools to match research needs. There is also a call for critical literacy in research, with a bias towards generative AI and a mostly reactionary approach to mis/disinformation.  These findings indicate a need to build foundational information literacy skills to support deeper, more critical AI literacy instruction.