Teaching media literacy in schools an effective counter to misinformation more coverage of our latest APSR www.thehindu.com/education/te...

nice coverage of our APSR article in The Print today! “Children are learning to fight fake news. Study shows classrooms help" theprint.in/feature/biha...

This is a great paper that I had a chance to read an earlier version of as a committee member for the @epovb.bsky.social Best Paper award (which it won).

And a village of people who’ve helped in various ways and given us feedback over the years. truly a dream project come true 🥹

So a rare piece of good news in the misinfo story. Teaching kids works. They retain lessons over time. And they teach their parents too 🌱 institutional support & sustained education can build resilience against misinformation :) Full paper open access: doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Another cool result- kids took lessons home to talk to their families!! We surveyed families of students and found that parents/guardians of kids in treatment groups ALSO showed improvements in discerning true from false info.

One of the more interesting findings- gender differences. Boys were way more likely to report intentions to engage in misinfo countermeasures, while there was no effect on girls. Suggests that if we want to change public behaviors around misinfo, much more work is needed

We custom designed the curriculum for this focusing on health misinfo. Our classes were super interactive, including fun activities and modules (see example below). We trained and hired teachers for this. Last pic is a treatment classroom in session in Vaishali, bihar 🧑‍🏫

Our intervention was called BIMLI - the Bihar Information & Media Literacy Initiative. Snapshot below of what the treatment curriculum looked like. To take into account student effort and attendance, we had a placebo control group receiving conversational English classes.

Even more striking: 👉 These gains lasted 4 months!!Positive effects endured 👉 Curriculum was focused on health but students became better at discerning political news also. Shows kids can learn and apply! 👉 Parents of treated students also improved at spotting false news

We find that treatment group students: ✅Became much better at discerning true from false info ✅ Shared false info less ✅ Trusted science & credible sources more ✅ Reduced belief in home remedies & fake cures

🚨 out at @apsrjournal.bsky.social 🚨 ➡️ We ran a large media literacy experiment to fight misinformation ➡️ 13,500 students, 583 villages in Bihar, India ➡️Created custom misinfo curriculum of 4 months ➡️Partnered w the government to roll it out as an official course in classrooms hopeful findings👇🏽

I'm thrilled to announce my first publication, as well as my first APSR and RCT paper. I am thankful to everyone who contributed to improving this project. 🙏🙏

🚨 Happy to share that our paper has now won the Best Paper Award from APSA´s experiments section ! @sumitra.bsky.social @priyadarshi-amar.bsky.social Florian Sichart

Great write-up of our media + information literacy intervention funded by the @ssrc.org´s Mercury project www.ssrc.org/mercury-proj... partners: Bihar´s BRLPS & Dataleads. @sumitra.bsky.social @priyadarshi-amar.bsky.social Florian Sichart Looking forward to seeing and testing more of these!

📣📣Excited to share a new working paper with @priyadarshi-amar.bsky.social and Apurva Bamezai. We develop and validate a phone-based measure to assess the magnitude of 'proxy' female politicians in gender-reserved villages in India. Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

New legal aid clinics in India spare thousands of people prison time, with a BCR of 7.6 www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/app/uploads/...

There is no greater political cynicism than Israeli government ministers who voted against a ceasefire deal for months and months, who now embrace the hostages and take credit for their release.

🚀 Launching a new #Stata package #geoflow that allows users to generate spatial arcs. This package is a culmination of over a year of work for building stable core dependencies. It also brings us one step closer to flexibly plot network data.