Teaching Political Science Students to Find and Evaluate Information in the Social Media Flow

Abstract

The advent of social media necessitates new pedagogical approaches in the field of political science, specifically in relation to undergraduate students’ critical thinking and information evaluation skills. Instead of seeking out traditional static pools of knowledge, researchers and researchers-in-training now interact with information in an amorphous stream of production and consumption. Socially created information is now firmly integrated in the basic subject matter of political science, as manifested in primary sources in the field, scholars’ communication practices, and the emergence of collective and distributed expertise. Existing models of information evaluation competencies do not address these realities of participatory authorship and decentralized distribution of information. Thus, in order to educate “information-literate” students in political science, educators must foster an understanding of how information is produced and how to critically evaluate individual information sources in the context of academic tasks.