Media Literacy To Take Away: What Teens Really Do When They Smell a Scam Online
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When you think about "critical thinking" lessons at school, you probably don't picture TikTok clickbait or dodgy online reviews. But a new study by education researcher Jennifer Alford (2023) followed ten migrant and refugee-background students in two Australian high schools to find out exactly that: does the media literacy taught in English class actually show up in kids' everyday scrolling?
The answer, encouragingly, is yes (with a twist). Alford interviewed two English teachers and ran focus groups with Year 10 students still learning English, tracing how classroom lessons on spotting bias, stereotypes, and fake news get reshaped once students leave the classroom. Rather than copying lessons word for word, students adapted them to their own worlds: sniffing out shonky product reviews before an online purchase, checking whether a website ends in ".gov" before trusting a health claim, or asking "what do they want me to believe?" before sharing a political post.
"What do they want me to believe?" — the question Year 10 migrant students were already asking before sharing a political post online.
Five strategies, real-world results
Five strategies stood out in the data: scrutinising images and wording, judging a source's trustworthiness, fact-checking, digging for more information, and spotting attempts to sway opinion. Interestingly, textbook concepts like "stereotypes" barely came up outside school; perhaps because platforms like TikTok already send up stereotypes for laughs, blunting their power as a critical lens. The classroom concept survived, but transformed into something more immediately useful: a general wariness toward content that pushes too hard on a particular feeling or conclusion.
It is a study with real strengths: rich, first-hand accounts from a group whose digital lives are rarely studied, and a thoughtful theoretical lens, recontextualisation, for tracking how learning travels between settings. But it is also a small, single case study of ten students, relying on self-report in English, a second or third language for every participant. Nuance may be lost, and the findings cannot be generalised broadly. What the study offers is a plausible mechanism and a useful provocation..
The broader evidence says it works
Why does this matter beyond one study? A meta-analysis of 49 experimental studies found that media literacy interventions reliably improve people's ability to tell real news from fake and reduce misinformation sharing (Huang et al., 2024). Large field experiments agree: a short, scalable digital literacy intervention measurably improved people's ability to judge headline trustworthiness in both the US and India (Guess et al., 2020). Alford's contribution is showing this isn't just theoretical: young, still-learning-English migrants are already doing it in resourceful ways because a classroom encounter with critical thinking had been quietly running in the background.
The obvious next step
The obvious next step is to extend this beyond teenagers. Many adult migrants learning English never get a classroom equivalent of these lessons, yet they navigate the same maze of scams and misinformation, often with higher stakes: a job, a visa, a bill. A fraudulent health website costs a teenager an embarrassing moment. It can cost an adult migrant significantly more. Building media literacy into adult English programs could be a small intervention with an outsized payoff for wellbeing and inclusion.
There is something quietly encouraging about what Alford's study found. These are students who arrived in a new country, are learning its language, and are navigating an information environment they were not born into — and they are not passive recipients of whatever their feeds serve them. They are asking questions. They are checking sources. They are doing, in their own language-learning, phone-scrolling way, exactly what media literacy education is supposed to produce. The lesson travelled. That is worth knowing.
The question now is whether we build on it, and whether we extend the same investment to the adults who need it just as much.
📚 Key references
Alford, J. (2023). Recontextualising critical media literacy: Year 10 English-as-an-additional-language students in Australian schools. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2023.2175094
Guess, A. M., Lerner, M., Lyons, B., Montgomery, J. M., Nyhan, B., Reifler, J., & Sircar, N. (2020). A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(27), 15536–15545. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920498117
Huang, H., Guo, L., Chou, Y. J., & Peng, T.-Q. (2024). Media literacy interventions: A meta-analysis. Journal of Communication, 73(4). doi.org/10.1177/00936502231183662
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