On October 23rd, Alison Head (Project Information Literacy) will be presenting the findings of her new study, entitled “”How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians,” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
How do today’s students find news, and how does news find them? You are invited to a research panel presentation about the latest research from Project Information Literacy (PIL) on Tuesday, October 23 (2:30 p.m. – 4 p.m., reception to follow) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Askwith Hall inside Longfellow Hall). Three researchers from the yearlong study — Alison Head (Director, PIL), Takis Metaxas (Wellesley College), and John Wihbey (Journalism, Northeastern University) — will be discussing findings from their new open-access research report, “How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians.”
Based on survey responses from almost 6,000 U.S. college students, this research represents perhaps the largest and most comprehensive effort exploring how U.S. college-age students are accessing, consuming, and engaging with news in the digital era. This work sought to understand how students see the role of news in their lives, in their learning and social communities, and in a democracy at a time when personal beliefs may carry more weight than objective facts, information platforms fuel endless debates, and the authority of traditional media is falling away. As librarians grapple with how to address news as sources while fundamental changes to the media landscape result in an abundance of misinformation, many find themselves asking the same crucial questions: How can we unravel the complexities of the “post-truth problem,” specific to our time, our technologies, and the information habits of today’s young news consumers? How can we develop a meaningful course of action based on the information available to us now?
In this session, research takeaways are presented and a question and answer with the attendees will follow. Please register online by October 16. There is no registration fee associated this event. (This event will not be live-streamed or recorded). Click here for more details about this presentation.