Abigail Hunke

Dr. Rick Cypert

Digital Literacy Paper 1

Preparing Students for Civic Duty in the Digital Age

For this case study I have chosen to focus on my 4th period Honors U.S. History

class, a group of 30 9th graders of various reading levels. I selected areas of weakness

based off of MAP Reading data. The average RIT score, which is the scale used by

NWEA MAP to measure student achievement and growth, is 230-241 for the class. This

means most students can analyze multiple main ideas in one informational text;

successfully summarize informational text and political speech; and determine details

that support and inference in literary nonfiction, evaluate evidence that supports a

concept presented in informational text, and analyze theme in a piece of literary

nonfiction. The blatantly obvious weakness in their literary abilities exposed through the

MAP Reading test, it that although students are successful understanding the main idea,

theme, moral, and argument of a piece of literature or informational text, they cannot

successfully compare the main idea, theme, moral, and argument between multiple texts

from different sources. In middle school, comprehension is emphasized in reading much

more than interpretation.

My goal as a 9th grade teacher, is to improve my students’ complex reading skills,

so they are not simply locating information from a text. Higher level reading and
historical analysis requires its practitioners to be well versed in identifying assertions an

author makes and recognizing reasons that support a claim in persuasive text. In

Honors U.S. History, we consistently read speeches from prominent politicians to

apprehend the political climate during significant time periods and evaluate the

different sides of polarizing debates in the past. Presidential campaigns, Senate

hearings, and public addresses feature speeches are always lined with bias. Information

is manipulated and phrased in such a way as to grant the speaking individual control

over the audience’s perception in the present and the historical narrative studied in the

future. If students cannot delineate between adequately supported claims and

inadequately supported claims in argumentative text, they are left with an incomplete

account and one-sided interpretation of a historical event.

In order to ensure, we are creating a generation of intentionally well-informed,

diligently well-rounded, and skeptical but well-intentioned citizens they MUST be

trained to compare and contrast viewpoints in multiple texts. Only consulting one

source, accepting generalizations, and failing to corroborate stories has led to the

obnoxious and disgracefully misleading rhetoric convoluting and dividing Americans

today. Partisan, for-profit news outlets masquerade opinion as fact and unassuming

audiences are trapped in this endless loop of reaffirming arguments presented with

flimsy, even downright fraudulent supporting evidence that would not hold up with
deliberate media consumption and consideration. My hope is that if students are taught

how to compare and contrast claims from multiple argumentative historical texts, they

will be better equipped to sift through the abundance of persuasive literature digitally

available to them, now in the real world. One of the biggest aims of Social Studies

education is to encourage citizenship and civic participation. The majority of the

resources that students access regularly are online, so it is particularly important for

them to have the skills to assess the validity of information online, especially if this is

their only means of being an informed voter and contributing member of society. This is

where digital literacy curriculum comes in. As I have observed so far, my students are

easily duped by false information and struggle with the critical thinking required to

evaluate content. Digital literacy training can help students learn to read laterally

meaning they have a healthy sense of skepticism and check their sources across multiple

platforms. Also, with proper digital literacy skills, students will be able to identify biases

that might exist in some articles, just as they practice in my class identifying an author’s

purpose and prejudice in historical texts.