Do Learning-by-Doing Interventions Work for Early Adolescents? Co-Evaluating a News Literacy Intervention

Abstract

Early adolescents (12-15 years old) are confronted with a lot of online news, but often do not evaluate this news on its trustworthiness, relevance, and accuracy. To date, there is a lack of effective interventions to stimulate their news literacy application, that is, the extent to which they use their news literacy when encountering online (news) content. Therefore, this study details the development and co-evaluation of a classroom intervention to increase early adolescents’ news literacy application. The intervention is based on news literacy theory, behavioral change theory, and co-creation, and presents an active approach to learning how to engage with news critically. In an online platform, participants learned to make the decisions involved in writing articles, writing their own news articles, and checking others’ articles. To further develop and co-evaluate the intervention, participants (N = 26) worked in the online platform for three lessons, after which they evaluated the lessons. Based on their within-platform activity, evaluation survey, and evaluation discussion with students and their teacher, the intervention was further improved to support guidance within the lessons, emphasize the competition within the platform, manage assignment expectations, aesthetics, and technical issues. Overall, the evaluations were promising: the intervention lessons were positively evaluated, and participants indicated to have learned from the lessons.