Misinformation Education
University of Washington
Fall 2020
An interactive media literacy lesson plan design for a high school classroom based on a series of interviews with educators.
Problem
The threat of mis/disinformation continues to grow as social media usage increases, which has only been accelerated by the pandemic. Although social media companies should hold some sort of responsibility for monitoring the kind of content that is available on their platforms, we cannot expect them to solve this issue on their own.
The current state of secondary education regarding mis/disinformation is either lacking or non-existent. Focusing on education, we wanted to find out how we can create a solution for teachers so that they have more readily available materials to teach their students about these large scale issues.
Role
I served as both a researcher and a designer for this project.
Question
How can school curriculum better prepare students for interactions with misinformation?
Process
Literature Review
Interviews & Key Insights
Ideation & Lo-Fi Prototype
Design Req’s & Final Feedback
Logistics
HCDE 598A
Topic: Misinformation & Design
10 Week Project
Team of 4
Literature Review
Our literature review revealed that there is a lack of cohesion for current school curriculum for teaching mis/disinformation in the United States. Through our sources, we discovered these major problem areas:
There is no set curriculum on this topic in the United States.
Many schools teach media literacy skills, such as checking sources and citing, but never take the next step to talk about misleading information.
Many teachers rely on the school librarian for all the resources but it is often not enough.
Gamification has been successful in past cases to teach students about mis/disinformation in a neutral way.
After our literature review, my team set up a handful of interviews with educators to get more insight into the teacher side of things.
Interviews & Key Insights
We conducted interviews with 5 teachers who work with various age groups from 7th to 12th grade. The subjects taught included Language Arts, Social Studies, and Journalism. From these interviews, we gained our key insights regarding our problem space:
Materials must be flexible to account for different teaching styles and different class structures.
Materials must give teachers some sort of resource, as there is not much available class material on the subject.
Materials should try to stay relatively neutral in terms of politics, to account for different communities.
We transferred our notes from the interviews into our Miro board and started an affinity diagram to better understand the problem space and determine the requirements for possible solutions. Grouping our insights together, we had a better idea of what a solution would need to be able to do. From here, we continued on to our ideation phase.
Ideation & Low-Fi Prototype
From our interview insights, we each came up with two possible solutions that could fit into our problem space. We then went through and rated each one on a list of criteria to determine how helpful, applicable, and easy these solutions would be to implement in a classroom. Our ranking led us to prototype a lesson plan with a “design for evil” approach activity that would encourage students to write their own disinformation based on a fantasy scenario that we provided.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Our team discussion led us to prototype a lesson plan that would include all the materials necessary for a simple game activity. The lesson consists of a brief overview of mis/disinformation including its definition and examples, a “design for evil” activity in which students have the opportunity to be bad actors and learn about how misinformation can be generated, and a reflection discussion at the end of the lesson.
Students will be given a scenario on which to base their piece of mis/disinformation as well as a piece of actual, real information based on facts. They will then submit them to the teacher, who will pick only one from each student. The whole class then has to read through the chosen examples and determine, using discussion and the tools for analysis provided in the lesson plan, which pieces of information are ‘real’ and which are ‘fake’.
The prototype consists of the following parts:
An overview of the materials needed, time requirement, and other logistical information.
An introduction to misinformation and disinformation with a definition so that the context is clear.
A tools for analysis section that teachers can use to guide their students through analyzing the provided examples of mis/disinformation.
The start of the game activity with instructions for the set up.
The worksheet needed for the students to complete this activity.
The fantastical scenarios based on which the students create their piece of mis/disinformation.
A reflection section with guiding discussion questions.
A section outlining which Common Core Standards this lesson plan can apply to.
Design Requirements & Final Feedback
Once our low-fidelity prototype was complete, we were able to get feedback from one of the teachers we initially interviewed. From them, we got some very helpful tips for improvement as well as affirmation of some of the decisions we had made with our design. We used the feedback and finalized our list of design requirements for this activity, as well as any future activities in this space.
The solution needs to be customizable for different school systems, class sizes, teaching styles, and other variants.
The solution needs to be clear on time and material requirements so that implementation is easy for educators.
The solution needs to adhere to Common Core standards so that educators can justify including it in their curriculum.
The solution needs to stay relatively neutral in terms of politics, to keep from alienating any students and ensuring the purpose stays true.
The solutions needs to fit into other parts of the curriculum so that students can keep thinking about these lesson when discussing other topics.
Constraints
Limited resources
As everything was online, our team relied heavily on our own personal connections to educators for our interviews. Although we still gained very helpful and valuable insights, further research should focus on more interviews with a wider variety of teachers in different school systems and in different locations.
COVID-19
The pandemic continues to keep us all online. Although this was not such a big issue for interviews, we were unable to test the lesson plan in an actual classroom with students. For future work, we would either have to wait to test this until we are back in-person, or our next iteration needs to be a fully online version.
Reflection
Thinking back
We were incredibly lucky to have our own personal connections to educators, as recruitment would have been very difficult for us. I wish that we would have had some way to get student feedback, but due to time constraints, we decided to focus on educators first.
Thinking forward
This project was an amazing opportunity to do more work in the realm of information security, as I had previously done some work focusing on cybersecurity policy. It affirmed my passion for working in this space and showed me once again that mis/disinformation continues to grow as a threat and that there is a massive problem space that is just waiting to be tackled by the UX community.