Critical Thinking and Media Literacy Skills: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

Abstract

This paper discusses experiences from an ongoing intervention study, designed to improve students’ media literacy skills and critical thinking. The purpose is to contribute to research on disinformation and conspiracy theories, and discuss to what extent critical thinking and motivations to use critical thinking skills can be employed to mitigate the harmful consequences of disinformation and conspiratorial meaning-making. Drawing from knowledge and experiences from working with an ongoing intervention, we will address questions such as: How can we merit from a cross-disciplinary approach to disinformation and conspiracy theories? What challenges are associated with designing an intervention to mitigate the allure of conspiracist thinking? Furthermore, we will address methodological challenges of assessing critical thinking as a cognitive measure and a skill, and relate this to ideals associated with critical theory. Finally, we will problematize approaches to conspiracist thinking and its implications for critical media literacy.