Most Millennials Faked Out by Fake News

At a time when “fake news” and online deception are topics of national debate, a majority of 1,000 college students and recent workforce entrants, aged 18-31, were unable to pass a basic, nine-question test of their digital literacy and critical-thinking ability.

The second-annual State of Critical Thinking survey commissioned by MindEdge Inc., a producer of online courses, and conducted by ResearchNow, found that only 19% of its millennial participants earned an “A” by answering eight or nine of the questions correctly, down from 24% in the inaugural 2017 survey. More than half couldn’t answer more than five questions correctly, earning a failing grade.

This year’s results were also worse in every segment, whether broken out by age, gender, or school type. For instance, in 2017 15% of students at two-year colleges got eight to nine answers correct, but that fell to just 9% in 2018. At four-year-plus colleges, 27% answered eight to nine questions correctly in 2017, but only 22% scored that well this year.

Contrary to their test results, these “digital native” respondents expressed an unwarranted confidence in their own capacity for critical thinking. Almost 60% said they were very confident in their soft skills and 40%—up five points from 2017—claimed to be very confident in their ability to see through bogus online content. At the same time, just 57% of participants said they believe their peers and colleagues are adept at critical thinking.

Millennials Claim to Learn Better from Tech

More than two-thirds (69%) of millennials aged 18-34 claim they learn more from technology than from people, according to an online Harris Poll survey conducted for Growing Leaders, a global nonprofit that produces leadership training resources. That contrasts with only about half of respondents aged 45 and older who made the same statement.

There was a gender variance, with 33% of male millennials “strongly” agreeing that they learn more from tech than from people, but only 19% of female millennials saying the same.

In addition, almost 60% of millennials reported they regularly feel overwhelmed in their daily life, compared to just 42% of adults overall. In every age group, more women than men indicated they regularly feel overwhelmed.

“Most of us don’t believe kids will be ready for adulthood when it arrives,” Tim Elmore, Growing Leaders’ founder and president, said in a statement. "We, as a collective force of parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors, must do a better job in helping prepare this future generation to be effective leaders.” That includes imbuing them with resilience and resolve, he added.

Young Adults See Web Design Differently

Young adults aged 18-25 don’t react the same as teenagers or adults over 35 to website design. That might pose some difficulties for colleges and universities that are trying to use their sites for a mix of purposes aimed at a wide range of ages: recruitment, enrollment management, online courses, advancement, alumni relations, and communications.

A new usability study by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), a web design consulting practice, confirmed the results of an earlier study with young-adult millennials. When this age group goes online, they generally have a purpose in mind. While teens enjoy finding games and other interactive elements on sites, those features are annoying to young adults unless they have a clear function—a quiz to help the taker determine the best course of action, for instance.

“Young adults are sensitive to tone,” according to NNG’s executive summary of the study report. “They will feel insulted if they suspect the site is talking down to them, and will notice if the site is trying too hard to appear cool.”

Unlike older adults, the younger cohort will open multiple tabs online at the same time in pursuit of the information they seek, a behavior NNG dubbed “page parking.” They also tend to work on more than one task online simultaneously (called “parallel browsing”).

Because they’ve grown up with the Internet, those 18-25 “tend to be extremely confident in their own ability to navigate digital interfaces, even when encountering radically new design patterns,” NNG noted. Whereas older adults will take their time in exploring a new interface and exercise caution before clicking, young adults will plunge right in and click away.

However, if they run into problems as a result, they’re apt to blame the site’s owner and view the online difficulties as representative of that organization.