This syndicate offers four recommendations to help educators adjust curricula to accommodate the rapid integration of data into journalism. First, instruction in numeracy and basic descriptive statistics must be required as either modules in existing courses or as separate offerings. Second, students should be taught to avoid mistakes in…

This paper gives instructors of Introduction to American Politics a template for teaching about media bias, using the case of President Trump and his administration. I present material for a combination lecture/discussion, including (1) a framework for evaluating partisan bias in news content, (2) discussion questions that move sequentially from…

While some journalists analyze and verify "open source" materials such as social media, eyewitness video, and satellite imagery to hold leaders and institutions accountable, many journalists and students are not learning basic digital verification skills. Research shows that journalists find this work challenging and that newsrooms do…

News literacy is an important part of journalism and liberal arts education. Adapting a tool called the Frayer Model, the activity guides students in developing a conceptual understanding of news by creating a definition, listing essential characteristics, and coming up with examples and non-examples. This activity is intended to set the stage for…

Courses: Digital Storytelling, Community Journalism. Objectives: This course is designed to introduce students to basic concepts in digital storytelling and community journalism. "Immersed in urban oil" is an interdisciplinary project-based, community-engaged course focused on documenting the historical and contemporary oil…

Journalistic skills courses often involve the production of a media project such as a multimedia website, which requires students to decide which media in their multimedia toolkit can best convey the story. To make the right match between content and form, students should understand the advantages of each of the available modes of communication.…

The author of this article describes an upper-level economics course where students learn to write economic news articles, which improves communication and audience-targeting skills. The course was created in partnership with a media outlet and designed around authentic assessments to provide students with a genuine experience based on academic…

Courses: Introduction to advanced classes in Media Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Race, Communication, and Advertising. Objectives: In this unit activity, students critically assess advertisements that co-opt female empowerment and then identify ways they can resist such strategies.

This executive summary provides a snapshot of the larger report, "How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians" (ED591128). The report represents perhaps the largest and most comprehensive research effort exploring how U.S. college-age students are accessing, consuming, and engaging with news…

This report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gathers information and engages with news in the digital age. Included are results from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state…

I start by considering some of the similarities between journalists and science teachers in their work and then go on to examine three questions that are of importance in dealing with creationism in schools: Is the issue one that is worth dealing with? How might one deal with it? What does one hope to achieve by dealing with it? I conclude that…

The Bunkum Awards are a sort of beauty contest for ugly people. Bestowed by the National Education Policy Center housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, they reward the most "nonsensical, confusing, and disingenuous" studies of education published each year. Contestants are drawn from reports critiqued by the Think Tank Review…

Objectives: Students will demonstrate research, decision making, team building, and public speaking skills, while applying issues management and crisis communication concepts in a realistic setting. Courses: Introduction to Public Relations, Public Relations Cases, Crisis Communication.

The First Amendment's guarantee of an independent press that may freely collect and disseminate news is often considered the bedrock of American democracy. Yet more than a century and a half after the "New York Herald's" John Nugent became the first American reporter jailed for refusing to identify a confidential source, reporters…

At the beginning of last year the assistant Middle Division director at the Berkeley Preparatory School challenged his faculty to collaborate with at least one teacher from another department in the division for a portion of one unit. Because the challenge was given at the beginning of the school year, it was received with trepidation, but, after…