Faculty Sponsor

Jill Alexander

Final Abstract for URS Program

The topic of news literacy has climbed in public interest, more and more every year for decades. In recent years, Missouri SB 678 from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education established a pilot program from 2024-2026 to implement pilot news literacy education programs in Missouri school districts and report findings at its conclusion.

UMSL’s Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) conducted research of UMSL news literacy habits in partnership with UMSL’s Political Science Academy (PSA). An initial survey in Fall, 2023 sought to identify the news mediums that are most often used through UMSL’s community, perceptions on credibility of news and the usage of different UMSL news channels among students, faculty and staff.

The following semester, more secondary research was conducted into information literacy, and survey responses from 2023 were qualitatively coded. Each survey asked students to identify examples of true and false media from 10 sample headlines, captions and images. To account for deceptiveness, students were encouraged to verify the answers as they were taking the survey, and provided verifiable results after each question.

Presentation Type

Visual Presentation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

April 2023

PRSSA URS Poster (1).pdf (1976 kB)
Poster for URS

News Literacy Scholarship Sources.docx (7 kB)
APA Sources for secondary research

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