Media Literacy Training Against Fake News in Online Media

Abstract

Fake news undermine democratic processes by misinforming citizens and discrediting official institutions as well as established media platforms. While many theories and approaches to combat fake news have been proposed within the last couple of years, there has been a lack of implementation and evaluation of media literacy trainings to oppose widespread online misinformation. To fill the void, this research combines digital game-based learning and classic theories of competency acquisition in order to provide an evaluation method for future media literacy trainings. To achieve this, the web based digital game “Bad News” has been evaluated in comparison to a classic text-based form of information transfer. While there have been no significant results supporting a higher efficiency of the digital game-based approach, positive effects on subjective learning success and motivation could be shown. This piece of research can act as a stepping stone for further research as well as grant first insights into the effectiveness of interactive digital game-based learning on the perception of fake news in online media.