Dr. Julia Lennox has been a social studies teacher for ten years. She recently completed her Ed.D. from West Chester University in May 2024. Passionate about teaching high school students critical skills to navigate the digital landscape, Julia created and implemented a media literacy course at her current high school. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the impact of this media literacy class on students’ cognitive processes while evaluating online sources.
This poster presentation provides an overview of a study that employed a case study- explanatory sequential mixed methods research design to investigate the impact a media literacy course may have on students’ cognitive processes while evaluating online information. In the first, quantitative phase, students completed a questionnaire and responded to performance tasks assessing their civic online reasoning skills. The sequential phase involved qualitatively analyzing assignments from the students’ media literacy course, performance tasks, and individual, semi-structured student interviews. The students' feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many reporting increased confidence in their abilities to evaluate online sources after taking the media literacy course. Qualitative findings suggested that students engaged with a blend of intuitive and analytical cognitive processes while evaluating online information, with varied accounts regarding their reliance on heuristics and the influence of biases. Although students reported the course enhanced their civic online reasoning skills, the results of the performance tasks showed that, overall, students did not achieve high levels of mastery across each task. These results highlight the complex nature of cognitive processes involved in evaluating online information and emphasize the need for future research on media literacy interventions to enhance students' abilities in discerning the credibility of online information.
