Critical literacy in the information age: Lies, damn lies and ...

As the authority of teachers and parents wanes, students increasingly turn to various media for advice and information. What skills, knowledge and understandings are needed for students to sort fact from fiction? How do students make sense of information presented in diagrams, charts or graphs? What meaning can be attached to advertising claims on television? Of more importance to teachers is the question of how we teach students to take a critical, questioning stance to the information they access. In this paper, media sources are used as a basis for developing appropriate teaching approaches to scaffold students’ thinking towards critical understanding. Beware! This approach uses numbers.