Media Literacy Education to Counter Truth Decay: An Implementation and Evaluation Framework

Media literacy (ML) education has emerged as a promising approach to slowing the spread of Truth Decay, described as the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in political and civil discourse. Several factors contribute to Truth Decay, including a rapidly evolving information ecosystem and overburdened educational institutions. Many teachers believe their students lack the complex skills that are necessary to navigate today’s information- saturated world. This gap—between students’ existing competencies and those required to engage responsibly in a fast-paced media environment— could lead to negative consequences for individuals and society writ large.

However, teachers report a lack of guidance around promoting ML education in their practice, and rigorous research about what kinds of ML education
work best, and in what conditions, remains limited. This report presents a framework for implementing and evaluating ML educational efforts. Following an introduction to the framework, the authors discuss six steps of ML implementation and evaluation: setting ML learning expectations; identifying conditions that can influence ML instructional efforts; exploring instructional resources; identifying measures of ML competencies; monitoring progress; and finally, measuring the summative impacts of ML education on student learning. By bringing this information together for implementors—such as district decisionmakers and teachers—as well as evaluators, the authors emphasize the important connections between these too often separate groups.