Fighting Fake News with the Framework for Information Literacy

A recent Stanford study found a “dismaying” number of students, from middle school to college, were unable to distinguish between ads and edited articles, activist organizations’ tweets and investigative reporting, and mainstream news sources versus fringe tabloids on the left and the right. If the study had extended beyond college graduates, no doubt the results would be similar. These days, understanding the information landscape and evaluating sources requires more due diligence than it did mere decades ago. The markers of reliability have become obscured or worse, counterfeited.

This is part of the reason we have moved away from “teaching the tools” at McIntyre Library. Up until the 21st century, information literacy instruction focused on skills based standards. But, unsurprisingly, many of the more basic skills were easy for students to pick up on. They could handle interfaces.  They had a harder time formulating searches, understanding what their searches were yielding, recognizing what was crapola, and figuring out how their findings fit together.

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) adopted in 2015, focuses less on skills and more on ideas, dispositions and abilities that college students can develop over time. The six frames represent interconnected concepts. For example, students learning about the role of citation within a discipline might touch upon “Information has Value,” but also “Scholarship as a Conversation.” The goal of the Framework is that students will not only understand the information world of the academy, but also become self-directed consumers and creators of information in the communities they participate in.

The Framework often encourages students to look at the whole rhetorical context of their research. When a student types a natural language query into a library database, much as they would with Google, like “What are the best cures for addiction?” we could offer them guidance and our opinions on the advantages and disadvantages some of the search terms. But more useful for their future searches is a conversation about how their topic is discussed by health professionals, therapists, reporters. We also often draw upon the rhetorical analysis skills our students learn in their Writing courses to provide a robust method for evaluating sources. It’s a method that takes into account the complexity of the information world we work with. And when it comes to fake news and fake science, we can talk about the frame “Authority is constructed and contextual,” helping students understand how authority can be mimicked and false contexts can be created.

The Full Framework comes with descriptions, dispositions and knowledge practices. If you are interested in working on one or more of the frames in an assignment, please contact one of the Research & Instruction Librarians. It’s not just for librarians anymore!


The Frames

AUTHORITY IS CONSTRUCTED AND CONTEXTUAL
Information resources reflect their creators’ expertise and credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which the information will be used. Authority is constructed in that various communities may recognize different types of authority. It is contextual in that the information need may help to determine the level of authority required.

INFORMATION CREATION AS A PROCESS
Information in any format is produced to convey a message and is shared via a selected delivery method. The iterative processes of researching, creating, revising, and disseminating information vary, and the resulting product reflects these differences.

INFORMATION HAS VALUE
Information possesses several dimensions of value, including as a commodity, as a means of education, as a means to influence, and as a means of negotiating and understanding the world. Legal and socioeconomic interests influence information production and dissemination.

RESEARCH AS INQUIRY
Research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field.

SCHOLARSHIP AS CONVERSATION
Communities of scholars, researchers, or professionals engage in sustained discourse with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations.

SEARCHING AS STRATEGIC EXPLORATION
Searching for information is often nonlinear and iterative, requiring the evaluation of a range of information sources and the mental flexibility to pursue alternate avenues as new understanding develops.