This study is part of the Surfing the Waves of Fake News (SURFake) project, involving 543 Spanish university students. Its purpose is to understand the variables related to potentially risky practices students engage in on social media and their educational shortcomings. An opinion questionnaire was used to establish levels of vulnerability to…

Three-year-olds often respond to lies as if they were true or with no clear rationale. Individual differences influence children's processing of misinformation. Here, we explore how two contextual cues (children's conflicting first-hand knowledge and different information sources) affect their ability to correctly interpret and respond to…

Misinformation around scientific issues is rampant on social media platforms, raising concerns among educators and science communicators. A variety of approaches have been explored to confront this growing threat to science literacy. For example, refutations have been used both proactively as warning labels and in attempts to inoculate against…

Post-truth strategies are characterized by the manipulation of facts and personal assertions of the truth for political gain. By seeding polarization, skepticism, and mistrust, post-truth presents challenges to teaching and learning within academic settings. In this paper, we explore how post-truth is articulated in higher education literature…

Pseudo-profound bullshit pertains to grammatically and syntactically correct but meaningless sentences, that, due to syntactical correctness appear as made to communicate something and research shows that people deem them profound. However, the effect of differing source credibility on bullshit profoundness evaluations has, to our knowledge, not…

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to advance, their integration into secondary and postsecondary education offers a multitude of opportunities for adolescent and adult learners. In this article, we delve into the advantages of integrating AI into literacy education, emphasizing its capacity to enhance writing skills, provide…

Psychological inoculation has proven effective at reducing susceptibility to misinformation. We present a novel storytelling approach to inoculation against susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy (d[subscript meta-analysis] = 0.82), a known cognitive predictor of conspiracy beliefs. In Study 1 (Pilot; N = 161), a narrative inoculation (vs.…

In the current post-truth era, the ability to assess the reliability of information is an essential citizenship attribute. With nearly half of the present internet traffic estimated to be generated by bots, and misinformation being regularly weaponised by numerous parties for economic or political gain, it is imperative that citizens are equipped…

The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw an explosion in popularity for the term "fake news." This phenomenon raises interesting questions: Which news sources do people believe are fake, and what do people think "fake news" means? One possibility is that beliefs about the news reflect a bias to disbelieve information that…

This paper proposes a new information literacy (IL) framework, based around mindfulness, that is suited for the contemporary informational environment. This framework results from a weeklong interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, theorising and incorporating mindfulness as a significant aspect of healthy information seeking and interpretation.…

This essay calls for a pedagogy of consilience and renewal as a dynamic fusion of research and practices in order to provide a more coherent way of examining some of the keen, interlaced variables that trouble the academy and society. The project challenges scholars to study five key scholarship of learning variables that should help transform the…

Real-world data are fundamental to modern teaching methodologies that aim to improve statistical knowledge and reasoning in students. Statistical information is encountered in everyday life, such as media articles and involves real-world contexts. However, information could be biased or (mis)represented and students should be concerned about the…

Background: Exposure to conflicting health information can produce negative affective and cognitive responses, including confusion and backlash, and the effects of this exposure can even "carry over" and reduce people's receptivity to subsequent messages about health behaviors for which there is scientific consensus. What is not known is…

In this article, we define and provide some history of "critical media literacy" (CML) in education. We then place critical media literacy in context of our current "post-truth" era. Next, we describe some of the consequences of adults' addiction to two decades of expanding, omnipresent new media to explain why we, like…

Politically oriented "fake news"--false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person--is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence…