Julie Edwards: Welcome, everyone!
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Julie Edwards: and so we will go ahead and start this webinar welcome. I am Julie Edwards, a librarian and instructional designer with niche Academy. Welcome to this webinar misinformation in the college classroom. How are faculty and librarians teaching news, literacy skills.
Julie Edwards: So before we get started, I would like to briefly introduce niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning platform to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measure learners success. So our software is the perfect tool for libraries. Looking to increase your E resource usage, deliver information, literacy, instruction and measure student success and provide training for patrons and staff, including your valuable student employees.
Julie Edwards: If you're interested in finding out more about what we do, talking to a member of our team, hearing what your colleagues and other libraries have to say, I'll go ahead and drop a link to our website in chat.
Julie Edwards: We are recording this webinar and I will make the recording, the slides, the chat, and the audio transcripts available on the blog. A few days after the presentation, all of you who have registered will get a direct email from me, letting you know when all of that information is ready, so you can just sit back and enjoy the content. 100
Julie Edwards: mit. Ctl. And you're welcome to turn on the closed captioning at the bottom of your zoom screen. If you would like to use that, please feel free to chat with each other in the chat. But if you have a question for Laura. Please put it in the question and answer. Box 149
Julie Edwards: things do tend to get lost in the chat, and this is a fairly big webinar, and so I want to make sure that I can moderate your questions at the end of the presentation.
Julie Edwards: This Webinar series is part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together, providing continuing education in the library world. And I'm really happy that so many of you have joined us today I will drop a link to our upcoming webinars, including webinars, specific for academic librarians in the chat box
Julie Edwards: without further ado. Our presenter today is Laura Saunders. Laura is a professor at Simmons University School of library and information science, her teaching and research focus on the areas of information literacy, including mis and disinformation, reference services and academic libraries.
Julie Edwards: She also teaches a course on intellectual freedom and censorship, and is the 2,019 recipient of Simmons. You know Simmons University's Provost award for excellence in excellence in graduate teaching.
Julie Edwards: Her most recent books include reference and information services and introduction coauthored with Melissa Wong and the Open access textbook instruction in libraries and information settings and introduction, also coauthored with Melissa Wong. Her articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including college and research libraries, the Journal of Academic Librarianship and communications and information literacy. I'm always so thrilled to have Laura here, and I will turn the webinar over to her.
Laura Saunders: Thank you so much, Julie. Thank you and welcome everyone. I can see there's O. Over 275 people participating, and I know I missed a lot of the chat. But I know I saw that there were a few people joining from the Uk. Trinidad and Tobago and Spain. So we are officially an international Webinar, which is really exciting.
Laura Saunders: So, as Julie said, one of my areas of interest and focus both in my teaching and my research is missing disinformation and information literacy. So that's what I am here to talk to you about today. And
Laura Saunders: today's
Laura Saunders: presentation is going to focus a bit on a couple of research studies that I did recently, kind of comparing and contrasting the results from faculty and librarians around missing disinformation in general and the importance of teaching news literacy skills.
Laura Saunders: And so, while I am going to be sharing a lot of information on my research findings I also do want to wrap up with by talking a little bit about what these findings might mean in practice, like what we can do with them, and then definitely, time for questions. So my agenda is just to talk a little bit about why information and news literacy is important. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think it's always good to just
Laura Saunders: just kind of set the context. And then I'll share my research on discipline, faculty and academic librarian perspectives on this and disinformation, and talk a little bit about what the next steps might be.
Laura Saunders: So why, news and information, literacy? And I will say that
Laura Saunders: I tend to use information literacy to be sort of the catch all phrase. So when I talk about information literacy, I consider news literacy as a part of that. So I see information literacy being somewhat the more general term and news literacy more focused on news and media information. But I'll probably use the 2 terms kind of interchangeably throughout this session.
Laura Saunders: One of the most important reasons why I want to focus on information and news literacy is that there is research that has shown that instruction and information and news literacy really can be effective and helping people to evaluate information more effectively, and as a result helping them to identify and hopefully avoid missing disinformation.
Laura Saunders: of which we know there is plenty. And I think this is, it's important that this is research based because there were some, I think, legitimate questions raised. About the media and information literacy instruction that was being developed in libraries. Some questions raised about how effective is this really and
Laura Saunders: is this really going to help people? To avoid missing disinformation? And so. Yes, it can be effective. But in particular, I think it's important to recognize that the liter, the literature and the research have really identified what is most effective. So things like critical thinking, getting people to really engage with the information, spend some time with it, ask some questions about it.
Laura Saunders: And also lateral reading. So rather than spending all of our time just trying to analyze a single source and figure out, you know, where. Who is this? Who's writing this it? How trustworthy are they, you know, who's the publisher, etc., actually moving out of what we're reading and checking it against other sources? Those 2 things have actually been shown to to really be effective in terms of helping people to verify information.
Laura Saunders: and again to avoid misinformation.
Laura Saunders: What we also know, is somewhat less effective. Are the checklists that, you know historically, were very popular. You know just these long lists of. Is this information peer reviewed? Was it published by a reliable publisher, etc.? That didn't really require people to get so cognitively engaged.
Laura Saunders: So that's a little bit about why I think this is important. This is my background on the research that I did and why I was motivated by it. I've been studying information Literacy pretty much for the entire time that I have been a faculty member all throughout my time as a Phd. Student. And
Laura Saunders: so I was. I've always been interested in information literacy, and I've always been in interested in the ideas of missing disinformation. But of course, when interest in this topic really kind of exploded around 2,016. It really
Laura Saunders: kind of prompted me to spend even even more time on it.
Laura Saunders: And I think.
Laura Saunders: while within library science. I think we always understood how important evaluation of information was. It was
Laura Saunders: reassuring to kind of see that other people were really starting to focus on this as well. Because most of my background is in academic libraries. I was really interested in how we might be teaching students, and in particular undergraduate students to understand and engage with misinformation, and to evaluate miss and disinformation. And in order to do that, I felt like I really needed to understand what faculty were doing. And then also what librarians were doing.
Laura Saunders: So my research questions were, essentially what our faculty perspectives on misinformation topics are. Faculty addressing missing disinformation in their classes? And if they are, how are they doing it? If they're not, why not
Laura Saunders: other disciplinary differences across faculty responses? And what are faculty perceptions of students, news, literacy, proficiencies. So that was one study. And then I did a separate sort of parallel study of academic librarians, and the questions were very similar. So what are librarians? Perspectives on misinformation topics?
Laura Saunders: Our librarians addressing this information in their instruction? If so, how and if not, why not? And then what are librarians, perceptions of students, news, literacy, proficiencies. And then, finally, I was interested in looking to see if the librarians and the faculty differed substantially in their responses.
Laura Saunders: So I did this research through surveys. And what I did is I actually took a random sample of faculty. I was lucky enough to have a research assistant the year that I was doing this we were actually working on this during the Covid year, so we got slowed down a bit as you can imagine. But what we did is my research assistant took a random sample
Laura Saunders: of four-year colleges from the ipads from the National Center of Education Statistics. And then from that list
Laura Saunders: Drew a random sample of faculty across all various dis different disciplines. I wasn't really able to do anything similar for librarians so instead of trying to draw a random sample, I just put a call for participation on a variety of library lists. So this was this actually went out just before a la switch over to
Laura Saunders: to the Ala connect. So this went out onto the acrlist serve Acrl frame and the information
Laura Saunders: information, literacy and instructional lists serve so essentially what I had were parallel surveys. There were almost identical surveys just tweaked a little bit for each population.
Laura Saunders: and each survey asked the participants for their perspectives on various topics or questions related to Miss and disinformation.
Laura Saunders: Ask them to talk about if they taught anything related to missing disinformation in their classes, how they were doing it, whether or not they were assessing it, and so on, and then ask them to gauge their students proficiencies in these areas.
Laura Saunders: And I did provide some definitions at the beginning of the survey, just to hopefully make sure that we were all on the same page. So my definition for misinformation is in inaccurate information that is shared by accident. Disinformation is inaccurate information that is shared on purpose or with the intention to mislead or deceive.
Laura Saunders: And then the news literacy, definition I just took from school journalism, which was critical thinking skills for analyzing and judging, the reliability of news and information, differentiating among facts, opinions, and assertions in the media we consume, create, and distribute
Laura Saunders: alright. So let me share a little bit about from my results, and I will apologize in advance. It is quite a bit of information, but I tried to condense it down as much as possible.
Laura Saunders: So first, just an overview of the groups that responded to the 2 surveys. So with faculty, I sent out about 688 surveys and got a 12.5 response rate. That is definitely low. But not out of the realm of, you know, kind of what is common or average for these kinds of surveys. I find
Laura Saunders: faculty in particular, are a little bit hard to get responses from and they did come from a range of disciplines, and you'll see some of those disciplines in a minute. But across the social sciences, humanities,
Laura Saunders: health sciences, natural sciences, social work, etc. Also a range of years that they had been in practice teaching and various job titles. So there were people at all sort of ranks of professorship.
Laura Saunders: For the librarians. I got 189 responses. I really can't calculated a response rate, because I'm not sure kind of how many people this. Those calls for participation reached.
Laura Saunders: But I can say that almost everybody who responded had an Mls or an Mls 70% worked in public universities and 30% in private universities. Once again there was a range of experience in the field, but almost 50% of the respondents said they spent at least a quarter to half of their time doing library instruction.
Laura Saunders: and 80% of them said that they liaise to one or more academic departments.
Laura Saunders: So now I'd just like to look at
Laura Saunders: this is just a breakdown of the number of faculty who responded by discipline. So again, you can see those social sciences, health, sciences, natural business, math, literature, arts, education, communication, social work and history. And you can kind of see there were a lot of people in the sciences who responded somewhat fewer as we start to move into the humanities and then fairly low proportion. From social work and history.
Laura Saunders: And so now, I'd just like to share some of the results from the faculty responses.
Laura Saunders: So on, the whole faculty are definitely concerned about misin disinformation in general and in particular.
Laura Saunders: 94% of faculty agreed or strongly agreed that they're concerned about the spread of mis and disinformation on social media. And 96% of librarians also agree with this statement.
Laura Saunders: 93% of faculty agreed or strongly agreed, that they're concerned about the spread of miss and disinformation in news media and 94% of librarians agreed. So you can see that there is you know, a lot of consensus among both faculty and librarians on some of these questions.
Laura Saunders: when asked if they agreed that the spread of misinformation is a threat to democracy. 85% of faculty agreed with that statement, and 90% of librarians. And then, finally, they were asked if the spread of miss and disinformation on social media should be regulated. I didn't specify how that should be regulated, so I didn't say that it should be regulated by government or by the industry
Laura Saunders: but just whether it should be regulated, and, interestingly, almost 59 of faculty agreed that it should be regulated but 67. So just over 2 thirds of librarians agreed with that statement. That was one of the only statements where there was a statistically significant difference between the 2 groups. Related to regulation of misinformation on social media
Laura Saunders: and
Laura Saunders: And then this is just looking at the concerns by field or discipline.
Laura Saunders: So
Laura Saunders: almost 50% in general said that they were concerned about miss, or disinformation in their field or discipline. So this is looking just at the faculty. So almost 50% said that. But then, as you dug in a little bit deeper and looked at the specific disciplines, there was quite a range. So almost 3 quarters of the faculty and health sciences said they were concerned with about missing disinformation in the field, and 60% of faculty in the natural sciences.
Laura Saunders: A hundred percent of faculty and communications and journalism said they were not concerned about missing the spread of miss, and disinformation in their field. I do want to point out that there was a pretty small number of faculty from communications and journalism, and I
Laura Saunders: can't say this for sure, but I imagine that they were interpreting that question to mean
Laura Saunders: concern about
Laura Saunders: their peers spreading miss, and disinformation as opposed to the spread of it in the media or in communications and journalism. In in general, like what is being shared with the public.
Laura Saunders: 43% of faculty and math. Computer science and technology said they were not concerned with the spread of misinformation in their field, and 38% of faculty and business said they were not concerned. So you can see that the help and natural sciences were much more concerned with the spread of miss, and disinformation in their field. And with many of the others it was somewhat less.
Laura Saunders: however, despite the fact that there was a range of responses, there were no statistically significant differences across these different fields with regard to their concerns about the spread of miss and disinformation in their field
Laura Saunders: on the flip side, 72% of librarians said that they are concerned about the spread of misinformation in the field of librarianship.
Laura Saunders: And there was a St. Statistically significant difference between the librarians and the faculty. So in general, librarians are more concerned about the spread of missing disinformation in their field than faculty are in their fields
Laura Saunders: respectively.
Laura Saunders: and I realized that this
Laura Saunders: slide might be a little bit hard to look to read. But it's truly said, we will make the slides available on the website, and you can kind of download them and and adjust them. But basically.
Laura Saunders: you can kind of see that in terms of being concerned about the spread of mis and disinformation in their own fields. You can see again that
Laura Saunders: the communication and journalism folks were the least concerned, and
Laura Saunders: those in the natural sciences, and probably the health sciences were among the most concerned.
Laura Saunders: So the next part of this was trying to get a sense of what do people think are useful
Laura Saunders: interventions or ways of combating mis and disinformation. What are some of the solutions? So one question asked, if instruction and news, literacy competencies, is important in combating misinformation. And for this question almost 90% of faculty agreed that news literacy instruction is important, and 92% of librarians agreed. So there was no statistical difference between the 2 groups.
Laura Saunders: When asked if instructors in higher education have a responsibility to teach news literacy skills, 75% of faculty agreed, and 92% of librarians. So there was a statistically significant difference here, and you can see that the librarians were more likely to agree that that instructors in higher education should be teaching news literacy skills, while
Laura Saunders: faculty were less likely to agree with that statement. I think it's still heartening that 3 quarters of them agree that they should. That somebody, some instructors in higher education should be teaching news literacy skills. Now, what wasn't clear, of course, from this question or from the research is which instructors, they believe should be teaching these skills.
Laura Saunders: and that was where the discipline questions kind of
Laura Saunders: helped me to probe a little bit, because what I found in earlier research that I did from when I was a Ph. D. Student is that faculty in general were very supportive of the idea of information literacy and
Laura Saunders: saw importance of the development of information literacy skills. But in a lot of cases they felt like it wasn't their responsibility. They taught in their discipline, and they felt like somebody else should be teaching this. Often, you know, they felt like it belonged in general education or in
Laura Saunders: introductory courses. So I was kind of interested to see if this might be the same with news literacy.
Laura Saunders: And I will get to that in a couple of minutes. But just still looking at potential solutions or ways of combating misinformation.
Laura Saunders: Two-thirds of faculty agreed that human driven, fact-checking sources are important in combating mis and disinformation. So these would be things like snoops and politifact and things like that.
Laura Saunders: And 85% of librarians agreed with that statement. So again, there was a statistically significant difference between the answers to these 2 questions between the 2 groups, and then when asked about whether artificial intelligence solutions, such as better algorithms, are important for combating this and disinformation.
Laura Saunders: 39% of faculty agreed with that statement, and 51% of librarians. There, although there was, you know, a bit of a spread there that was not statistically significant difference between the 2 groups.
Laura Saunders: So like I said, I was then interested in finding out if faculty and librarians were addressing this and disinformation in the classroom. and if so, that how they were doing it, and in particular, if I might see some differences across the disciplines.
Laura Saunders: So with regard to teaching about Miss and disinformation. And so this was really the question was fairly open-ended, so were they addressing Miss and disinformation topics in one or more of their courses. I didn't define how they might be doing it, whether it was through class discussions, assignments, etc.
Laura Saunders: So 67% of faculty said that they do address issues of missing disinformation in one or more of their courses. And, interestingly, there was no statistically significant difference across the disciplines. So that was heartening to know that that 2 thirds of them are addressing it, and that it didn't seem to make a difference. Which disciplines
Laura Saunders: they were responding from with that, said both 16 respondents skip this question altogether, and so that meant that there were some disciplines that were not represented at all in that number.
Laura Saunders: On. With regard to librarians, almost 80 of librarians said that they are addressing issues of miss and disinformation in their instruction.
Laura Saunders: So like, I said, I was also then interested in how they're doing this. So for the faculty. They're addressing, missing disinformation in a variety of ways. So among those about almost 30% said they require students to cite trustworthy sources, and 20% said they require students to argue positions using trustworthy sources.
Laura Saunders: 20 said they're actually incorporating direct instruction on news literacy. And 9 said that they include assignments that require students to identify miss or disinformation
Laura Saunders: out of those who are teaching Miss and disinformation, only 10% said they actually assess their students ability to identify missing disinformation.
Laura Saunders: and almost 80 79 said, they have not worked with the librarian to address Miss, and disinformation in their classrooms.
Laura Saunders: and then, of course, there were those faculty who said that they were not addressing this and disinformation, that they were not teaching anything related to misinformation in their classrooms. So that was about 33% who said that they have not addressed miser disinformation in their courses.
Laura Saunders: And when asked why the reasons varied, but interestingly, almost 48% said that the concept of missing disinformation was not relative, relevant. Excuse me, not relevant to their field or discipline.
Laura Saunders: There was a statist statistically significant difference across fields for this answer, and interestingly, and perhaps somewhat concerningly, a hundred percent of the respondents and health sciences, math, computer science and literature indicated that miss, and disinformation is not relevant to their discipline. Now I wanna pause here for a minute.
Laura Saunders: Just to say that again. This was a very small group of respondents. I believe that for health sciences only 3 people, 2 or 3 people basically said that they were not addressing this and disinformation.
Laura Saunders: and said, that it was because it was not relevant to their discipline. Now, again, this gives me pause, nevertheless, because to my mind missing disinformation really does impact across all fields and disciplines in some way, shape or form, in the health sciences. In particular, I find it hard to understand what aspect of the health sciences
Laura Saunders: would not be in some way impacted by miss and disinformation. But
Laura Saunders: the important point here is that there are some instructors who definitely feel that way, although it is a very small number.
Laura Saunders: Turning back to other reasons why Faculty said that they did not address missing disinformation in their in their courses. 23 said that the concept should be addressed elsewhere in the curriculum, and 15 said, they don't have time to address this content. So this was interesting, because again, I felt like those 2 answers aligned with
Laura Saunders: what I had heard in previous research that I had done that again. There's a lot of faculty who think that this is important. Think that it should be addressed. They just don't feel like they are the person to do it, whether because it doesn't, you know, it doesn't fit in their curriculum, or they don't feel like they have the time, but they do think it should be addressed somewhere.
Laura Saunders: As I said, almost 80% of librarians said that they were addressing this and disinformation in their library instruction. But for those who were not teaching this and disinformation again the the responses for why they weren't teaching. It varied.
Laura Saunders: Only 22 said that they did not address Miss, and disinformation of those almost 40 said it was because the faculty that they were working with
Laura Saunders: had not requested content related to missing disinformation. And I think this this speaks very much to the reality of the job of academic library instructors that we typically still are guests in somebody else's class. We're still often doing one shot sessions, and we're trying to tailor those sessions very much to what the the faculty member asks us to do what seems to be the
Laura Saunders: needs of the class at that time, and so a large proportion of the respondents said that the faculty were not asking them to do that.
Laura Saunders: 30% said they didn't have time to address the content. 12 said that that content should be addressed elsewhere in the curriculum, and 10% said, it's not relevant to their liaison department. So again.
Laura Saunders: I did take some pause here. It's a very small number. It's, you know, 10 of the 22 who said that they're not doing this. But again, to my mind, I would think pretty much every academic department or discipline. Would find some relevance to miss and disinformation topics. So I did think it was interesting to see that
Laura Saunders: As I alluded to, I did ask people to try and give an overview of their their students news literacy proficiencies.
Laura Saunders: I do want to point out that a lot of people are not assessing they're not directly or formally assessing their students on missing disinformation. So we have to take these ratings of their students proficiencies with a grain of salt, because A lot of this, I think, must come down to some extent to sort of anecdotal evidence and speculation. Also, you know, it's very hard for
Laura Saunders: for faculty, and librarians to to gauge in a very general way. You know a a number of people wrote in to the comments of the survey that, you know, they did see a difference between, say, first year students and upper classmen in terms of their proficiencies. But they couldn't really capture that in the survey.
Laura Saunders: But with that said most of the responses in terms of student proficiencies clustered around the middle of the scale. So they were asked to rate their students in terms of being very proficient to not proficient at all, and they mostly clustered around the middle, which I think is
Laura Saunders: probably what we might have expected.
Laura Saunders: So students were rated most proficient in evaluating information for relevance. So 33% of faculty said that their students were proficient or very proficient in evaluating for res relevance. And about 26% of librarians said the same.
Laura Saunders: Students were rated least proficient in areas related to identifying miss and disinformation in scholarly sources. So
Laura Saunders: almost 2 thirds of faculty and just over 2 thirds of librarians said that students were weak or not at all proficient in identifying this and disinformation and scholarly sources.
Laura Saunders: about 50% of both faculty and librarians also evaluated students as weak or not at all proficient in evaluating research methods.
Laura Saunders: And then, 43% of faculty and 35% of librarians rated their students as weak or not at all proficient in evaluating information sources for bias. So I mean.
Laura Saunders: I think these are relatively high numbers. And you know the the very low ratings definitely speak to. I would think a need for more direct instruction and news literacy instruction in particular, related to these areas.
Laura Saunders: So just a little bit more of on the comparisons between the faculty and the librarian responses.
Laura Saunders: So there were no statistically significant differences in these 2 areas. First, was agreeing that instruction in news. Literacy is important to combating this and disinformation, and also in the likelihood of addressing this and disinformation in the classroom. And these were 2 findings that definitely gave me some hope.
Laura Saunders: And and I thought, we're very spoke to some opportunity. You know the fact that so many faculty and librarians agree that news literacy instruction is important.
Laura Saunders: tells me that even if they're not teaching it, they, there's some potential, some opportunity for finding ways to integrate that into the classroom because they do recognize it as an as important. And, as I said, I think it's also reassuring that there's no statistical difference between faculty and librarian in terms of how likely they are to address miss and disinformation with the majority of them actually addressing it
Laura Saunders: that's okay. okay.
Laura Saunders: next slide in terms of not teaching miss, and disinformation faculty are more likely to report that miss or disinformation is not relevant to their discipline. Librarians were less likely to say that
Laura Saunders: faculty were also more likely to say that miss, or disinformation instruction should happen elsewhere in the curriculum. And, like I said, this is not unusual. These are findings that I have seen in previous research, and I think it speaks to the fact that as as that faculty tend to be very focused on their discipline area, and they see things like information, literacy and news literacy is being more general skills that should be taught elsewhere.
Laura Saunders: On the Flip side, librarians were more likely to say that they don't have time to address Miss, and disinformation in their instruction. And again, I think this just speaks to the reality of the classroom experience for most academic librarians that we're often teaching one shot sessions. We might get an hour with the students, and there's often just a lot of content to be covered.
Laura Saunders: Librarians were also more likely to rate students as weak in news literacy skills, generally speaking, and in particular, in terms of identifying misinformation and popular sources, and in scholarly sources, and evaluating the logic of arguments presented in a paper and selecting appropriate information to support an argument. So across the board, the librarians were more likely to say that students were weak in all of these areas.
Laura Saunders: Again, I think this is an area where we have to take a little bit of a grain of salt. Neither the faculty nor the librarians seem to be doing much direct assessment of students skills. So a lot of this is anecdotal the faculty typically are spending more time with the same group of students and
Laura Saunders: and seeing more of their their work product. But with that said, I think that librarians may have more, maybe more focus on the nuances of this and disinformation.
Laura Saunders: So in terms of just some discussion and takeaways.
Laura Saunders: misinformation and news literacy are definitely important topics. Both faculty across the disciplines and librarians are concerned about students, news literacy skills in general. And, as I said, they, they don't see them as being proficient or very proficient
Laura Saunders: across the board. We also agree, both faculty and librarians, that news literacy is important.
Laura Saunders: and instruction is taking place in about two-thirds to 3 quarters of the classrooms of the people who responded to this study. So what we're seeing is that people recognize the importance of
Laura Saunders: of news literacy, and they're concerned about news literacy skills. And they're concerned about misinformation and across the board. They are trying to engage their students in some of these topics.
Laura Saunders: however, not everybody sees this as relevant. So some faculty did say that they don't believe miss, and disinformation is relevant to their discipline. And some faculty. And librarians believe that news literacy should be addressed elsewhere, although it's not clear what elsewhere means. Does this mean general education courses? Does it mean something extra curricular like workshops outside of class.
Laura Saunders: I do wanna say that I didn't really spend a lot of time on this in in the findings, but I did do some follow up interviews with faculty. I was only able to get 6 faculty to agree to interviews. So it really wasn't a large enough sample to draw a lot of con conclusions. But, interestingly, there was one faculty member who taught business and accounting, who in the interview was was fairly adamant that
Laura Saunders: missing disinformation was not relevant to what they were teaching. Their sense was that they they teach business. They teach, you know, the math of accounting. That this is not something that is impacted by missing disinformation, that there are essentially right and wrong answers. And so II put this in there for just a little bit more context of how some of the faculty are kind of conceptualizing this.
Laura Saunders: So the role of librarians to kind of bring this home to sort of the practical issues. What I saw from the research is that librarians are playing already playing some roles in terms of addressing misinformation. Many librarians are already teaching
Laura Saunders: or in introducing misinformation topics in their instruction. So there is direct instruction in news literacy skills happening. And this includes activities that require students to evaluate information and to identify miss and disinformation. And although it's far fewer, there are some librarians who are requiring assignments or finding ways to assess students in news literacy skills.
Laura Saunders: Librarians also reported collaborating with faculty in a lot of different ways. And so some of it was related to direct instruction, including tailoring instruction sessions, for faculty. As they went into their classroom. Some of them were also working with faculty to design activities and assignments related to missing disinformation. I think this is a really great way to work with with faculty.
Laura Saunders: you know, considering the ratio of librarians to faculty and then to students. It's really unlikely that librarians are always going to be able to get into the classroom and do that direct instruction, but I think if they work with faculty to develop activities and assignments that get to those skills, they can have a little bit of a wider reach.
Laura Saunders: And then likewise many librarians reported creating research guides and tutorials that, again, might not have been direct classroom instruction. But were things that faculty could either incorporate into their their instruction, or students could access on their own.
Laura Saunders: But in addition to what librarians are already doing, I definitely see some potential for for more
Laura Saunders: activity. So, as I mentioned, very few faculty are collaborating with librarians on news, literacy, instruction. But what I think is important is that many of them recognize that librarians do have expertise both in the open ended responses to the survey, and in the interviews the faculty did
Laura Saunders: mentioned that they saw librarians as experts, especially with regard to missing disinformation.
Laura Saunders: and some of the faculty even said that they felt like they. The faculty, were not necessarily experts in this area. Some of them actually said that part of the reason they were maybe not addressing this, and disinformation, or not addressing it as thoroughly as they would like, is because they felt like it wasn't something that they understood as as well as they wanted to, and they wanted more support. In in doing that. So
Laura Saunders: that to me seems like a real opportunity.
Laura Saunders: if we're able to connect with those faculty who see an importance in addressing misinformation, who recognize librarians expertise, and who also really want support. I think there are going to be ways to integrate more attention to miss and disinformation
Laura Saunders: into the curriculum. I think that that potential for collaboration could come through in a number of different ways. I think there needs to be some increased awareness by librarians of faculty concerns and perspectives. So again.
Laura Saunders: although we share a lot of the concerns, I think it's it's helpful to know where faculty concerns are concentrated. You know, especially those faculty who are very concerned about the spread of misinformation in their disciplines, and the ones who see their students as having
Laura Saunders: really low proficiency in certain news, and information literacy areas. I think those are opportunities for librarians to reach out and to offer some support. But on the flip side. I think there's also a lot of need for increased awareness by faculty of librarian expertise, even though faculty do seem to be aware of it. I think that often the problem is, they don't know how to take advantage of it.
Laura Saunders: In some cases it's a feeling of not having time to add something else to their curriculum or to their classroom. But in a lot of cases I think it's not really clearly seeing what the librarian could do for them.
Laura Saunders: And again, I think this is something that came out more clearly for me in the interviews of the listening to the faculty talk about much they respect of the librarians, how how
Laura Saunders: much expertise they believe the librarians to have, but not really recognizing how the librarians could really come into their classroom or help them with designing assignments and things like that. And at and through the conversation with those faculty, often by the end of the interviews, they were starting to say that they were seeing those opportunities. But you know we we need time for those conversations.
Laura Saunders: And then, finally, I already alluded to this. But you know, librarians, there's not enough of us to go around. Unfortunately, and so it's unlikely that librarians are going to be able to get into every classroom and reach every student, and so a train, the trainer model could be a a good way to go, at least in some cases, especially if there are faculty who are saying, this is something I want
Laura Saunders: to do. I see librarians as experts. What I need is some help.
Laura Saunders: Then I think what we could do is run. Some workshops work with centers, for teaching excellence on campus, things like that to try and give faculty the support they need and the training they need to do some of this teaching on their own
Laura Saunders: and then finally, I do. Before I get to my very last part, I do wanna recognize, like the limitations of this study. And there were a lot of them. First of all, as I've mentioned a couple of times I did have very small sample sizes. All, or although the sample size was large, the response rates were quite low. So while that's not uncommon. It's also it is a limitation. And we do want to be really careful
Laura Saunders: about drawing too many generalizations from the findings. And in particular, I think, especially, perhaps, with the faculty. It's important to recognize that the people who chose to respond to the study may have been different in some important way from those who chose not to respond to the study, and that that might have skewed the results. I think it's very likely.
Laura Saunders: having seen the sort of
Laura Saunders: title and topic of the survey. That faculty who are already interested in missing disinformation, who maybe were already teaching it, or at least thinking about it were more likely to respond to the survey. So I do just want to kind of keep that in mind.
Laura Saunders: So finally, I just want to wrap up by talking about what some of my next steps might be. First of all, like I said one of the things that I was able to kind of tease out in this research was the fact that people are teaching something related to missing disinformation in their classrooms. But I don't know exactly what is being taught. And so I think some future research could definitely look at.
Laura Saunders: What are the areas that faculty and librarians are focusing on? Are they looking at things like attention to bias problems with peer review? Integrating alternative perspectives on topics? Are they teaching specific skill sets like using chat checklists or doing fact checking
Laura Saunders: and also because of those faculty who did express some lack of confidence in their own ability to teach missing disinformation and their interest in in more support. I'd really love to kind of probe that area a little bit more
Laura Saunders: and find out how how confident faculty are. I'm also interested in how confident librarians are. Although it was a very small number. There were a couple of librarian respondents who did express misgivings about teaching about missing disinformation and kind of feeling like this was a really tricky area and a very contested area. And so I'd I'd really like to learn a little bit more about that.
Laura Saunders: In addition to these sort of potential future studies that I'd like to do, I'm currently
Laura Saunders: in the midst of expanding this, the librarian part of this study into other countries. So I have a colleague in France who has already run the survey with academic librarians in France, and we're starting to compare the results across the 2 countries.
Laura Saunders: And we have now recruited additional colleagues from about 12 other countries, mostly across Europe and Central Asia, who are going to be replicating the study over the spring semester. So I am hoping by this summer to have a full set of data from about
Laura Saunders: somewhere between, you know, 10 to 15 countries where we can compare across these various countries how academic librarians are thinking about and teaching this and disinformation, so I hope to have some more information. To share with you. About that very soon.
Laura Saunders: So I am going to stop sharing my screen.
Laura Saunders: and and we can turn it over to questions.
Julie Edwards: Thank you so much, Laura. There's been a fantastic chat going on so many questions. I have a bunch myself, but I will seed to to the group. So someone starts by asking when you say news media, do you mean any sort of news, channel, local or national. I just want to be sure that I'm understanding.
Laura Saunders: Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, I kind of you leave it pretty open ended to be both local and national and also, you know, because I didn't define it in this survey, I'm sure people could also be thinking about sort of more traditional journalistic news as well as
Laura Saunders: more sort of opinion type news sources.
Julie Edwards: Thank you.
Laura Saunders: Someone's asking, were you disappointed that so many faculty from the humanities fields that would seem to have this be much more relevant to them didn't show up as much. Do you think the results would have looked different if there had been a bigger share of humanity's faculty responses? Yeah, definitely, you know, I think
Laura Saunders: some of the the humanities, and I'm speculating a little bit here, but I think some of them might have, you know, almost in the same way that the accounting professor was saying, well, I just teach math, and math has right and wrong answers that some of the humanities, professors, especially, maybe in literature and languages, weren't
Laura Saunders: initially seeing a connection there and kind of thinking. Well, you know, I just teach language. I just teach, you know, syntax or you know, when we're analyzing a novel. We're not talking about missing disinformation. But, interestingly, one of my interviewees was a creative writing professor, and he had all kinds of really interesting insights into how literature can be kind of like a a lens for looking at misinformation.
Laura Saunders: disinformation? And he actually taught a course on conspiracy theory. So absolutely. I think if there was a bigger sample we'd see a wider range of responses for sure.
Laura Saunders: Thank you. Yeah.
Julie Edwards: Our respondents from community or junior colleges included in the results. And if they were, did you notice any differences?
Laura Saunders: That's a great question. So unfortunately, I didn't have there wasn't a demographic question to separate out community college. So unfortunately, I am not able to see how many respondents may have been from community colleges, or and I'm not able to kind of compare the answers. That is a great question, though, and I think that that would be a really great area to explore in an in another study.
Julie Edwards: Thanks.
Julie Edwards: Someone. Actually, several people have brought up this thing that you mentioned. Also, I think. do you think that faculty would be more willing to tackle misinformation if they didn't already have so much work to do. Did that surface anywhere
Laura Saunders: it did. I mean, there were a few people who in the survey said that they didn't have time to address miss and disinformation, and you know, to an extent, I think, that came up in the interviews as well, I can definitely say that for the most part most of the interviewees 5 out of the 6 were very
Laura Saunders: very passionate about the ideas of missing disinformation. But I think they did also feel like often that there's just a lot of content already that they have to cover. And then, you know I'm speculating a little bit here, but beyond the content that they have to cover in the classroom, I think there's a sense of just how much planning, they have to do so. Yes, I think that that is getting in the way. For some people of just feeling like
Laura Saunders: there's background information they would need to do to prep for it, to plan lessons around it, and then they already have such limited time in the classroom. And so I think.
Laura Saunders: One thing that potentially could help is if we could see if we could help faculty to see how this might already be sort of part of things that they're they're currently teaching. You know, if they're talking about
Laura Saunders: you know, at health sciences, I'm sure, is is an easy example. But if they're talking about current health news. Certainly missing disinformation could be addressed as part of that as well.
Julie Edwards: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Someone's already looking forward to your future research asking, did you ask, or can you ask next time? Not just who should teach Newslet? But when do and do you have a sense of of
Laura Saunders: when people should when students should be getting this, should it be be d being done at the college level? Yeah. I definitely would like to ask that question next time. I did not integrate at this time like who should be teaching it when? But I do think that's a really good question to ask, because, you know, like I said, I'm repeatedly hearing people say like, Yes, this is important. Somebody else needs to do it.
Laura Saunders: With that, said.
Laura Saunders: I did do some previous research that I did. On information. Literacy, not related specifically to missing disinformation, looked at and compared high school librarians and academic librarians, and their sort of ideas around information literacy. And what I would say is that I think there's there's mostly a consensus that this has to span not, and not just high school to college, but really pretty much
Laura Saunders: elementary school through college. That this is the kind of thing that we really need to kind of scaffold throughout students learning. And so I would say, within higher education.
Laura Saunders: really, this is something that should be addressed by a lot of different people in a lot of different places. I think librarians are definitely the right people to address it. But again, I think faculty have to be involved as well. And I think that we can introduce these kinds of topics and skills in general education classes. But I think that.
Laura Saunders: as I said, I see these questions as being relevant across the disciplines. And so I think it should be scaffolded into the disciplines. You know, understanding that how we think about. You know what is missing disinformation, how we think about it, how we evaluate it
Laura Saunders: could look a little bit different in, say, the health sciences than maybe in the humanities. So I think it really does need to kind of span all of that.
Julie Edwards: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Several of our colleagues are looking to do workshops outside of instruction sessions. They're teaching this stuff at a very high level in the classroom. But they're curious. Do you have recommendations for places where there are resources or lesson plans that they can build bigger workshops
Laura Saunders: for larger sessions. Yeah, definitely. I do think there are some good things out there, I think, like the acrl sand box, the acer frame, sandwich, sandbox and primo are some good places where people have been sharing lesson plans and even other kinds of materials, like slides and things like that.
Laura Saunders: in terms of this is maybe a little bit more about instructional planning and design. But the book that Melissa Wong and I wrote which is instruction in information centers. It. I'm sorry. Instruction and libraries and information centers. It is an open access textbook, and we do have in there like a couple you know, different activities and and scenarios and things like that
Laura Saunders: that, like I said, are not necessarily specifically
Laura Saunders: designed around missing disinformation, but I think they're around instructional design and could be adapted. I think some of the ideas could be adapted. I'm trying to think. I'm sure there are some other resources out there that are not coming readily to mine, but I think those 3 as a starting point.
Julie Edwards: Excellent! Thank you. And I just dropped the link to that book in the chat. Yes, So here's the the questions that have come in now are, you know, we're getting into the Meta level now. People are are talking about some of the questions that they hear from students like, what is a non-bias newspaper? Is there anything we can trust?
Julie Edwards: How do you know how? What's your recommendation for librarians answering those questions, or even approaching the maybe the mindset as opposed to the skills someone else is bringing up.
Julie Edwards: We rarely talk about confirmation bias. So people are hardwired to think that when they see something they agree with. It's automatically good information. So any thoughts about approaching
Julie Edwards: those issues?
Laura Saunders: Yeah, I think it's it's very challenging
Laura Saunders: in terms of, you know, is there a non biased source or trustworthy news source? I think it's important to recognize and to help students to recognize that some sources are generally more trustworthy than others. And there is that that there are a couple of sources. There's the news media, bias chart, that sort of plots, the 50 or something. Sort of top producing media outlets on this chart of sort of
Laura Saunders: how accurate they are! The extent to which they they publish opinion versus opinion and analysis versus straightforward reporting. I think that could be a good starting place to kind of get people get students to look at first of all, like, what are the criteria that these
Laura Saunders: these places have used to analyze these new sources? What would make one place fall sort of more on the unbiased end of the chart than the biased end of the chart. There's also a source called media bias. Yeah, the media bias check that you can put in almost any source and I've even used some international sources, and it gives you a rating again about how sort of objective
Laura Saunders: or bias. Their reporting is you know, I think those can be good starting places. I think there's a few other things just getting people students to understand sort of journalistic
Laura Saunders: approaches and ethics and the ways in which
Laura Saunders: you know the more trustworthy outlets will follow those journalistic standards and ethics understanding that
Laura Saunders: at the same time that you know nobody is completely nobody and no source is completely unbiased. And that's part of the reason why we want to do this lateral reading so that we can look across a few different sources and try to see like, where is the consensus? And does do any of these sources? Are they able to confirm each other and things like that? And then also, you know, kind of
Laura Saunders: thinking about, even if a source is relatively trustworthy, right? Like routers, or associated press, are kind of really re highly rated in these these various bias check outlets.
Laura Saunders: there's still individual reporters and staff people involved, each of whom do have their own bias. And so I think everything kind of has to be sort of double checked and taken with a grain of salt. But at the same time we do have to then kind of find some places that we feel like we can agreeably rely on if that makes sense, and I'm not sure if I caught the entire question.
Julie Edwards: But no, I think you've covered it. Someone's asking the the link for the checking media bias. Is that I think II just found it. But I want to make sure. Is it media bias fact checkcom.
Julie Edwards: I'll drop that in the chat. Yeah, thank you.
Julie Edwards: let's see.
Julie Edwards: someone is asking, what are your thoughts about the contradictory messages we send when we encourage fact checking of a claim against what mainstream media reports, while also encouraging the consideration of alternative alternate perspective.
Laura Saunders: Yeah, I mean, I think this. It is really challenging. And it's the kind of thing that we need to have more time, I think, to really
Laura Saunders: to tease these things out with our students because it's complex, and it's nuanced right? You know. Yes, absolutely. On the one hand, there are big institutions that traditionally, we have relied on and trusted. You know, those traditional media outlets. But even you know, even government agencies and things like that, that. On the one hand, we're saying
Laura Saunders: you should be able to trust them. On the other hand, we're saying you still have to fact. Check them. And what if that fact checking leads you down a rabbit hole right? You know the the Q anon mantra is do your own research right? And and so I think part of it is
Laura Saunders: kind of setting this framework of like. Yes, we do need to. We need to double check things. We need to fact check things. We need to. You know, we need to consider alternative perspectives, because we do know that there are voices that haven't been considered or included and whose perspectives are important. But then I think we have to come back to alright.
Laura Saunders: How do we? How do we figure out what is the best information that we have right now, first of all. So
Laura Saunders: you know, how do we figure out what claims seem to be more trustworthy, whether it's based on consensus sourcing. You know the yeah, the various kinds of sourcing, the the confirmation that we're able to find across various sources. And I think we have to. It's very hard and nuanced. But I think we have to help students to kind of understand that
Laura Saunders: they there is
Laura Saunders: the potential for kind of keeping an open mind while also recognizing that certain certain sources or types of information are sort of objectively more reliable. There's
Laura Saunders: Tim Granches, has is doing some work on what calls intellectual humility, which I'm seeing as like a really
Laura Saunders: promising avenue. The whole, the I can't explain it as well as he would, and certainly not in in this short time. But his work is really kind of about this idea of
Laura Saunders: helping students to develop a mindset of being open minded and recognizing that we may make mistakes. That our perspective or our belief or our decision, may, you know, may have to be re thought. And I think that that's there's a lot of promise between kind of that. I that disposition of intellectual humility and this
Laura Saunders: need to kind of be open to looking at perspectives and fact checking and I'll I'll get Tim's name for you and put it into the chat. I'm sorry.
Laura Saunders: alright, and
Laura Saunders: I just put Tim's name into the chat. If anybody wants to look up his work. it's really great.
Laura Saunders: Laura. Thank you so much. I we really appreciate this. This research is fascinating. Thank you so much for your time and your expertise. You're getting a lot of thank yous in the chat.
Julie Edwards: Thank you all for attending this afternoon. A as again. I'll send all of this information out to you in a few days. We really appreciate your presence here. And your your thoughtful questions, and your engagement in the chat. I hope you all have a wonderful
Laura Saunders: rest of your afternoon, and that we will see you at our next academic library. Webinar. Thanks so much. Everyone. Thank you. Everyone have a great night.