The importance of media literacy education: How Lithuanian students evaluate online news content credibility

Abstract

Nowadays, when the flow of fake news in traditional media and on social media platforms has increased dramatically, media and information literacy (MIL) skills are more important than ever. MIL promotes the critical thinking skills that enable people to make independent choices, in particular how to evaluate and choose different information sources and channels, as well as how to interpret the news and information received through those channels. This article explores how young people in Lithuania evaluate the trustworthiness of news. Two groups of students were selected for the experiment: young people who had participated in a basic course in MIL, and young people whose learning was minimally related to MIL. The study was conducted using a survey and eye-tracking device that enabled researchers to record and analyse readers’ real behaviour and to identify the distribution of attention, i.e. the concentration of sight and time spent on particular news elements. The research results show a clear difference between these two groups and thus confirm the importance of media literacy education.