A pc game helped upper secondary school students grow to be higher at distinguishing between reliable and misleading news. That is shown by a study conducted by researchers at Uppsala University and elsewhere.
“That is a crucial step towards equipping young individuals with the tools they should navigate in a world filled with disinformation. All of us have to grow to be higher at identifying manipulative strategies — prebunking, because it is understood — because it is virtually not possible to discern deep fakes, for instance, and other AI-generated disinformation with the naked eye,” says Thomas Nygren, Professor of Education at Uppsala University.
Together with three other researchers, he conducted a study involving 516 Swedish upper secondary school students in several programmes at 4 schools. The study, published within the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, investigated the effect of the sport Bad News in a classroom setting — that is the primary time the sport has been scientifically tested in a traditional classroom. The sport has been created for research and teaching, and the participants assume the role of spreader of misleading news. The scholars within the study either played the sport individually, in pairs or in whole class groups with a shared scorecard — all three methods had positive effects. This surprised the researchers, who believed students would learn more by working at the pc together.
“The scholars improved their ability to discover manipulative techniques in social media posts and to differentiate between reliable and misleading news,” Nygren comments.
The study also showed that students who already had a positive attitude towards trustworthy news sources were higher at distinguishing disinformation, and this attitude became significantly more positive after playing the sport. Furthermore, many students improved their assessments of credibility and were in a position to explain how they may discover manipulative techniques in a more sophisticated way.
The researchers noted that competitive elements in the sport made for greater interest and enhanced its profit. They due to this fact conclude that the study contributes insights for teachers into how serious games could be utilized in formal instruction to advertise media and knowledge literacy.
“Some people consider that gamification can enhance learning at school. Nevertheless, our results show that more gamification in the shape of competitive elements doesn’t necessarily mean that students learn more — though it might probably be perceived as more fun and interesting,” Nygren says.
Participating researchers: Carl-Anton Werner Axelsson (Mälardalen and Uppsala), Thomas Nygren (Uppsala), Jon Roozenbeek (Cambridge) and Sander van der Linden (Cambridge).
