IDC Review

IDC Review This paper presents a study evaluating a web application to teach children news literacy. It is an interesting pilot investigating a worthwhile topic, and the paper is organized in a logical fashion, but in several respects the research is not specific enough. The issues discussed below pertain not just to the structure of the paper, but to the design of the study. I hope that this criticism is useful as you prepare for your next study. 

In the introduction and the background sections, numerous worthwhile learning goals pertaining to news literacy are mentioned—far too many to be able to address in one study. It would be more helpful to focus on specifically what you are addressing in the study, explain what it is, why it matters, and what is known about how people learn it. This would position the paper to make specific points about prior work and about the design of the current system. The paper currently presents two primary features in the web application—allowing the creation of a cover image for a newspaper, and an interactive narrative in which children can play the role of a reporter. The paper does not explain how these were chosen, why they are hypothesized to be effective means of learning, or which learning goals they might help students to master. 

In the methods section, you use an instrument developed by Maskl et al which is backed by a clear construct and which has been validated—this is great, but I could not tell that from the paper. I had to look at the reference. If you plan to use this instrument in the future, you should explain the construct and how it aligns with your own study’s framework and research questions. This instrument was apparently used to establish a news literacy baseline; now it is necessary to explain how that baseline is to be used in combination with other measurements and observations from the study, and why such analysis makes sense. Unfortunately, a sample size of eight, where you interact with each child for a single workshop, is not enough to be able to establish any quantitative findings. The qualitative observations presented are very interesting, but cannot be productively used to support an argument without a clearer conceptual framework and research questions explaining how you interpreted what you saw and what you were expecting to see.