NoFakeFacts

Young citizen science project to promote media literacy and scientific literacy among adolescents

The ongoing digitalisation of society and the media landscape has changed the demands on citizens' media and information literacy in order to maintain an overview in the digital information jungle and distinguish between serious and less serious news. Children and young people in particular are a vulnerable group due to their intensive use of social media: Extremist groups, populist actors and conspiracy theorists use these media to spread their often entertaining content and fuel mistrust of state institutions. Given that young people are still in a developmental phase and thus highly impressionable, urgent action is needed here.

The project ‘#NoFakeFacts!’ starts at this point and aims to gain well-founded scientific insights into the information behaviour of young people by interlinking science, political education work and school lessons. The active involvement of young people and their perspective on how they deal with information and their expectations of the media, science and democracy are central to this.

The project consists of the three phases CONDUCT! CREATE! CONTINUE!

In the first phase, CONDCUT!, the students work as Junior Scientists on the empirical implementation of the scientific questions. In two workshops, they learn about different social science methods in addition to content-related aspects, which they actively help to shape, thus making a comprehensive contribution to promoting information and media skills as well as scientific thinking among adolescents. The active participation of the students and the resulting age-appropriate view of the research process and results also offers decisive added value for the researchers.

In the second phase of the project, CREATE!, the participating students, as creators, reflect on their own scientific findings in several workshops and translate them into teaching materials. The design of such teaching materials often suffers from the fact that they are developed by adults and the perspective of the age group is not taken into account, so the project aims to develop sustainable, age-appropriate teaching materials. The work process is to be recorded on a social media channel specially set up and designed by the pupils in line with the topic and to teach young people how to use social media responsibly.

The third project phase CONTINUE! consists of a science day at the partner schools, where the pupils present the results of the project to the public and training sessions are held with teaching staff as multipliers to publicise the newly created teaching materials.