Story explorers: Evaluate news coverage
In this classroom activity, students select an event or issue in the news that interests them.
Six zones of information
As the amount of information at our fingertips grows at an unprecedented rate, filtering information is an increasingly essential news literacy skill. The foundational concepts of InfoZones help guide students to the vital realization that not all information is created equal and that the credibility of different types of information is often correlated with their purpose. By helping students discover six primary purposes of information, you can help them develop the habit of questioning the purpose of all the information they encounter.
Of course, most pieces of information have more than one purpose — a television show that is produced to be entertaining can also be informative, for example, or an advertisement produced to sell a product or service can also entertain — but this lesson helps students understand that almost all the information they encounter has one primary purpose that has a significant effect on its credibility.
Primary purposes and zones:
- To entertain: entertainment.
- To sell: advertising.
- To persuade: opinion.
- To provoke: propaganda.
- To document: raw information.
- To inform: news.
Definitions for each purpose and zone are included in the poster linked below. This poster was adapted from the InfoZones lesson on our Checkology® virtual classroom. Use it with that lesson or with the classroom version of the InfoZones lesson.
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