Teaching Media Literacy? Start by Teaching Decision-Making

"Looking closer at digital media showed us the need for decision-making."

• By Patrick Bresnahan
• 07/30/25

In the spring of 2024, we set out to improve student engagement in my digital media literacy course by listening to students and parents regarding their concerns.

What emerged was a shared sense of concern — about how digital media may be influencing teens' mental health, relationships, and sense of self. In a media-saturated world, students aren't just absorbing content — they're interpreting, reshaping, and responding to it daily. This makes media literacy an essential part of preparing youth for digital life. Both groups expressed a strong interest not just in understanding digital media, but in developing the decision-making skills needed to navigate it more thoughtfully.

Being informed about digital media is not the same as being ready to make good decisions about it. In schools, instruction often emphasizes content knowledge but rarely creates space for students to practice making decisions. Yet decision-making is a skill that must be developed — not assumed. Students need opportunities to learn the tools and practices of effective decision-making so they can apply what they know in meaningful, real-world contexts.

Nowhere is this need more urgent than in students' digital lives. It's not enough for them to identify misinformation or critique what they see online — they also need to take ownership of the choices they make as digital participants. From managing screen time and avoiding distractions to evaluating sources and shaping their online presence, these everyday decisions reveal a deeper need: to teach decision-making as a core component of media literacy.

So How Do We Teach Decision-Making?

Fortunately, this doesn't require a complete curriculum overhaul. For content area teachers, decision-making can be taught by designing instruction that makes visible the decisions embedded in disciplinary tasks. This instructional design draws on the emerging field of Decision Education, which integrates insights from psychology, economics, philosophy, and other disciplines to help students learn how to think clearly, critically, and reflectively.

The Alliance for Decision Education outlines four core learning domains that guide this work: thinking probabilistically, valuing and applying rationality, recognizing and resisting cognitive biases, and structuring decisions. These domains help educators design learning experiences that go beyond content delivery, prompting students to purposefully gather and assess information, consider alternative perspectives, evaluate risks, and apply knowledge in real-world situations. In a media literacy context, they help students evaluate source credibility, detect bias, weigh evidence, and make informed choices about the media they engage with and produce.

One area where these decision-making skills are especially relevant — and immediately applicable — is in students' daily interactions with digital media.

Decision Education and Digital Media Literacy

Framing digital media literacy through the lens of Decision Education begins with the mindset that decisions are at the core of how students engage with digital media in their daily lives. From scrolling through social media to producing content for a class project, students are constantly making choices about what to believe, share, create, and value. These everyday actions aren't just habits — they are decisions that influence how students understand the world, construct meaning, and participate in public discourse. When students learn to recognize and evaluate these choices, media literacy becomes more than a set of critical thinking skills — it becomes a practice in intentional, values-based decision-making. Decision Education supports this shift by helping students navigate digital spaces with greater awareness, responsibility, and purpose.

One way this shift takes shape in the classroom is through structured reflection activities that make students' decision-making visible. For example, at the end of a newscast project, students participate in a postmortem — a process where they revisit their completed video to analyze the choices they made during production. They identify key decisions — such as selecting sources, framing stories, editing content, or choosing visuals — and reflect on the reasoning behind those choices, what worked well, and what they might do differently next time. This kind of reflection strengthens both decision-making and media literacy: Students learn to evaluate how their choices shaped the meaning and impact of their message, and they begin to apply that awareness when consuming or creating media in the future.

This reflective practice deepens students' media literacy by helping them analyze how meaning is constructed and communicated through their own work. At the same time, it sharpens their decision-making by encouraging them to examine the reasoning behind their choices and consider how they might improve them. By connecting content creation with critical reflection, students develop habits of mind that help them question sources, assess credibility, recognize bias, and think intentionally about the messages they send and receive.

Reflection can also prompt students to consider how their work will be perceived and interpreted by others. While fostering empathy can be challenging, it often begins when students start to think about their audience. In one case, a student noted that a newscaster's speech was hard to follow, prompting the group to re-record the clip for clarity. By anticipating audience confusion, they took responsibility for making their message more accessible — an important step in both ethical media creation and thoughtful decision-making.

Provide Structure for Decisions with Explicit Instruction

When students are expected to make decisions in the classroom, they need more than encouragement — they need explicit instruction in how to do it. This includes modeling how to evaluate options, anticipate outcomes, and choose actions that align with their goals. Once these strategies are modeled, students can begin applying them in their own work. Before starting a task, prompting students to reflect on what they want to accomplish and how they plan to approach it can surface meaningful strategies and provide an entry point for introducing decision-making tools or frameworks. Instruction that supports decision-making helps students clarify their goals and guides them toward informed, intentional choices throughout the process.

A key part of this instruction involves helping students recognize and resist common cognitive biases that can cloud their judgment. In the classroom, students often seek out information that supports what they already believe or rely on information that is most easily accessible. To address confirmation bias and availability bias, teachers can prompt students to examine their assumptions by asking questions like, "What evidence challenges your view?" or "What important information might be missing?" These practices help students engage more critically with information and become more deliberate in how they evaluate sources, form conclusions, and justify their thinking.

Small Decisions with Big Impact

Integrating Decision Education into the classroom starts with a few intentional shifts that lead to meaningful impact. These changes create space for students to practice making decisions, reflect on their thinking, and apply what they've learned beyond the classroom.

One student commented that he now turns off his phone at night after realizing how social media was affecting his sleep. Another recognized that his lack of motivation in school was behind choices like skipping assignments or tuning out. These reflections may seem small, but they show students becoming more self-aware and beginning to align their choices with their values. This kind of growth doesn't happen automatically — it happens when students are given the tools to think through their decisions.

When students struggle to start an assignment, it's often not because they don't understand the task, but because they haven't learned how to make decisions about where or how to begin. Decision-making is a skill, not a given. Whether students are reflecting on cognitive bias, evaluating sources, or analyzing their media work, the goal is the same: to help them build the self-awareness and reasoning they need to navigate not just the internet, but life. Media literacy that centers decision-making builds not just critical thinkers, but thoughtful, responsible participants in today's media-driven world.