The legislation recently passed both the House and Senate and is awaiting Gov. John Carney’s signature.
The standards, which take effect in the upcoming academic year, are to be used to provide instruction in two main areas: digital media literacy to help students differentiate between fact and fiction online, and understanding the detrimental effects of “inappropriate technology use” such as bullying and harassment via social media.
They can be taught by teachers of English, social studies, health, science, and other subjects, or by librarians/media specialists, if schools have one.
McBride said the measure “allows educators to really address these two significant, insidious problems: a mental health crisis exacerbated by online bullying and a democratic crisis fostered by disinformation, misinformation.”
One guiding principle of the effort was a recent Stanford University survey of high school students which found that 96% lacked the skills to judge the reliability of information online, and two-thirds were unable to tell the difference between news articles and advertisements.
A story on Stanford’s website said that “researchers found that students were too easily swayed by relatively weak indicators of credibility—a website’s appearance, the characteristics of its domain name, the site’s ‘about’ page, or the sheer quantity of information available on a website, irrespective of the quality of that information.”
Although the bill was triggered by the bogus allegations of voter fraud that Trump and some fellow Republicans perpetuated after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, McBride stressed that the standards won’t be teaching any ideology — just how to discern the truth and spot lies.
She acknowledged that Republican opposition — no GOP senators and only four GOP members of the House supported the bill — was fueled by the sense that it was an attempt at “teaching students what to think, not how to think” and was anti-Republican.
“I think there were misconceptions about what this is,” McBride said. “I think there was a self-selecting into this being a critique of a singular political party. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem. This is truly for all of us.”
Kids today ‘are complete digital consumers’
The standards and materials must include instruction on:
- The purpose and acceptable use of different social media platforms.
- Understanding the negative impact of inappropriate technology use, including online bullying and harassment, hacking, viruses, invasion of privacy, and piracy.
- Social media behavior that promotes cybersafety, cybersecurity, and cyberethics, including etiquette, security, and the identification of hate speech.
- Identifying credible sources of information and how to access, analyze, create, and participate in all forms of digital communication.
- Understanding how media messages shape culture and society, identifying target-marketing strategies and techniques of persuasion, recognizing bias and misinformation, and evaluating media messages based on personal experiences, skills, beliefs, and values.
- Identifying the purpose of explicit and implicit media messages, values, and points of view that are included and excluded, how media influences ideas and behaviors, and the importance of using multiple sources.
Every three years, DOE must prepare a written report about how districts and charter schools implemented the standards.
DOE spokeswoman Alison May said students “need these skills to critically consider information” and “evaluate multiple forms of media sources and analyze the information found.”