Project Objectives

Objectives

The present project aims at expanding the reach of media and information literacy and empowering citizens on media and information literacy by targeting young people (8-12 years old).

In the present-day media-saturated world, there is an abundance of easily accessible information sources about almost every topic, often threatening to overwhelm the reader. The problem for the citizen is to make sense of all this information, including accessing it, having a critical understanding of it, interacting with it, and factchecking.

Readers lack sufficient skills to evaluate and process digital information, including adolescents (Kiili et al., 2018; Kiili et al., 2022; Tarchi & Mason, 2021), which may endanger citizens’ possibilities to form evidence-informed decisions on important issues in their lives.

Given this, we believe that there are two important aspects that would better prepare adolescents to improve cognitive capacities that allow them to access media information, have a critical understanding of it and interact with it:

• First, as it seems that education systems have not successfully prepared all adolescents with sufficient media and information literacy skills, teachers should be better supported to design effective, research-based media and information literacy practices. Several studies have shown that the higher teachers' self-efficacy, the more open they are to new ideas, the more willing they are to experiment with new methods and the more they are engaged in professional learning activities (Runhaar et al. 2010).
• Second, to support students' survival with the information overflow, adolescents' limited cognitive processing capacity should be supported and taken into account when designing instruction. Based on the Air Traffic Control metaphor (www.developingchild.harvard.edu), such cognitive processes (i.e., executive functions) regulate the flow of attention and information creating mental and flexible priorities on time, thus avoiding “collisions” and loss of cognitive efficiency. By explicitly addressing executive functions, we increase students’ self-regulation competence in modulating cognition (Butterfuss & Kendeou, 2018) and facilitating complex learning (Schwaighofer et al., 2017) within the media world.