The role of gamification in the development of (fake) news literacy in higher education

Abstract

Fake news has become a major societal concern, particularly in the online and social media sphere. Higher education institutions have an important role to play in fostering critical thinking and promoting media and news literacy. Therefore, educators need to explore effective and innovative ways to teach news literacy. Online games have emerged as a potentially promising tool. Against this background, the paper presents a framework that conceptualises competences relevant for news literacy and 'fake' news literacy. It then uses the framework to conduct an evaluation of 17 popular and freely available online games about misinformation and disinformation and their suitability for developing competences relevant to (fake) news literacy in a higher education context. The findings indicate that the games were generally limited in scope and covered only specific news literacy competence areas. The paper discusses the results of the analysis and develops some suggestions for the integration of games in the higher education landscape.