Illinois high school students to receive media literacy instruction this year

When Illinois high schoolers go back to school this month, they'll have new coursework that lawmakers and Stanford researchers hope will prepare students to better detect misinformation and search for ulterior motives before trusting online news, social media and information sources.

In 2019, Stanford researchers showed more than 3,000 American high schoolers a grainy, anonymously posted Facebook video of people stuffing ballots into bins and then asked them to figure out if what they saw was "strong evidence" of voter fraud in the United States. More than half of the high schoolers said they believed it was, even though reputable news outlets had published articles explaining the footage was actually shot in Russia. A paltry three high schoolers figured this out. 

 In 2021, Illinois, which has around 600,000 high schoolers, became the first in the nation to require a unit of media literacy instruction in their high school curriculum, and the law takes effect this school year. In most schools, the media coursework will be folded into one or more existing courses; Chicago public school students returning this week can expect units about navigating online media to be included in many of their classes.