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Recent academic research has highlighted the prevalent concerns of adults and parents regarding their children's digital engagement, particularly focusing on social media usage and screen time allocation. Our project aims first and foremost to answer the following research questions:

1) What factors make some school communities more able to recognise and be resilient to Disinformation than others?

2) How impactful are the Common Sense Digital Citizenship resources in improving learners’ digital literacy, including their ability to recognise and resist misinformation and fake news?

Our project also aims to explore how the  Common Sense curriculum materials contribute cumulatively, in smaller units and over time, to nurturing healthy and critical digital habits and dispositions among students, (for instance, responsible behaviours that enhance online safety, informed decision-making, critical thinking, screen time management, mental well-being preservation for self and others, and informed, compassionate digital decision-making. A comprehensive study conducted by Ofcom in 2021 in the UK revealed additional parental worries related to their children's online activities, including cyberbullying, online privacy, exposure to inappropriate content, financial pressures for online purchases, and concerns about online gaming, such as in-game spending, bullying in gaming communities, and game content. In light of such concerns, our project also seeks to better understand children's online gaming habits and the potential value of Common Sense materials as an intervention therein.

In June 2023 we started working in four schools in and around London (2 primary and 2 secondary) to reach our four main objectives: 1) to train teachers of 4 classes in each school to teach the Common Sense Digital Citizenship Curriculum; 2) to produce age-appropriate baseline evaluation materials of no longer than 30 minutes to establish the baseline media literacy and critical digital awareness of the children; 3) to observe the complex interplay of school environment, teaching and learning going on during the media literacy intervention with the use of the Common Sense Digital Citizenship Materials in the classrooms for 6 weeks in each case; and 4) to conduct post-teaching quizzes, interviews and focus groups with the teachers and children to establish how effective the materials are at improving different age cohorts’ critical media literacy in regard to issues such as digital safety and security; online identity protection; being able to distinguish marketing materials online and particular originators and promotors; being able to recognise fake or improper information from a range of sources.

The findings of this evaluation will be of use to parents, children, young people, teachers and other educators working with children and digital environments; its direct utility will, of course, be to the Stakeholder Common Sense in tightening its materials for the UK audience; and to the funders (DSITS) to improve the collective evidence base about effective ways of delivering media literacy interventions, and inform the development of intervention evaluation best practices.

Professor Shakuntala Banaji
Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change

Interests and expertise: Bollywood; Hindi cinema; South Asia; audiences; children; creativity; film studies; international media; media education; media literacy; misinformation and disinformation; online participation; social media, toxic speech and hate speech; youth civic participation

Dr Fiona Abades Barlcay
Research Officer

Interests and expertise: media and culture; online labour; critical media literacy; digital and popular cultures; postfeminism and neoliberalism; girls and young women; online communities and parasocial relations.

Saumyadeep Mandal
Research Assistant

Interests and expertise: film studies; subaltern media; caste; dalits; audiences; spectatorship; popular culture

The project team also includes Jenna Khanna from Common Sense Media.

This project is funded by the (DCMS).