Journalism as Model for Civic and Information Literacies

• In Event: 63.070 - Learning Sciences: New Methods, New Populations, and New Domains

Abstract

What are the knowledge, skills and dispositions that students need in order to make sense of contradicting information online and to use media to further their civic goals? In order to better support young people to be effective and literate citizens in the digital era, we need models of expertise in relevant domains to help us identify naive conceptions and scaffold novice learning. This poster proposes Civic Journalism as such a domain and presents results of a Cognitive Task Analysis with five expert journalists that have a civic orientation. Three levels of results are presented: a journalism process, four core cognitive constructs of journalism, and design implications for scaffolding civic journalism production and instruction with networked and digital tools.

Authors

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University

• Gulnaz Tajoddin Saiyed, Northwestern University

• Matthew Easterday, Northwestern University