Developing and Evaluating A Game-Based Approach to Media Literacy

A stock photo rendering of students using the Agents of Influence program running on a school computer. — A Rendering of Students using Agents of Influence in the classroom

SRI partnered with Alterea Inc. to support the development and evaluation of Agents of Influence, a game-based digital media literacy program for secondary students.

Digital media and technology are central to how young people learn, communicate, seek information, and participate in online communities. Schools need engaging and developmentally appropriate ways to support students in building digital and media literacy skills.

SRI Education partnered with Alterea Inc., the developer of Agents of Influence (AOI), on an IES SBIR Phase II to support the development and evaluation of AOI, a web-based, narrative game designed for middle and high school students. AOI uses a spy-themed storyline to help students practice critical thinking, research, analysis, and communication. Through game-based missions, students gather and evaluate information from multiple sources, assess credibility and evidence, identify bias and misinformation, and practice making thoughtful communication choices in digital scenarios.

Our work

From 2024 to 2026, SRI conducted a series of coordinated research activities to examine AOI’s usability, feasibility, implementation, and promise for improving student and teacher outcomes. The work included:

A usability study to gather feedback from students and teachers as they interacted with selected AOI games and features. This study helped identify where users could navigate the platform successfully, where they experienced confusion or technical issues, and what refinements could improve the user experience.
A feasibility study that examined whether AOI could be integrated into classroom instruction. Participating teachers used AOI with students and provided feedback through surveys, implementation logs, interviews, and related data collection activities. Student feedback was also collected to better understand engagement, perceived learning, usability, and classroom fit.
A pilot evaluation that used a randomized controlled trial design to examine the effects of AOI with middle and high school students across several subject areas, including English language arts, social studies, media literacy, and computer science. Teachers were randomly assigned to either use AOI with their students or continue their typical media or digital literacy instruction during the study period. SRI assessed student digital literacy outcomes, digital-literacy-related social-emotional outcomes, and teacher media literacy competency, while also collecting implementation data on AOI dosage, classroom use, and teachers’ experiences integrating the game into instruction.

Key findings and outcomes

Across the project, AOI showed promise as an engaging, classroom-friendly approach to digital and media literacy instruction. Teachers generally found AOI easy to use and helpful for addressing topics that are often difficult to fit into existing curricula, including misinformation, source credibility, bias, and digital citizenship. Teachers also valued AOI’s ready-to-use instructional supports, such as lesson materials, discussion questions, and tools for monitoring student progress. Students responded positively to many of AOI’s interactive and game-like features, including missions, puzzles, and character dialogue.

The pilot evaluation found that AOI supported students’ digital communication outcomes. Students who used AOI reported significantly greater confidence in their ability to communicate, collaborate, share information, and participate appropriately in digital environments than students who received their typical instruction. Exploratory analyses also suggested that AOI may have been particularly beneficial for students who began the study with lower levels of digital communication empathy, although additional research is needed to confirm this pattern.

The study did not find statistically significant effects on measures of misinformation identification or civic online reasoning. These findings should be interpreted cautiously because both measures were adapted for the study and showed limited reliability, potentially reducing their sensitivity to changes in students’ skills over the relatively brief implementation period. At the same time, exploratory analyses suggested that sustained engagement may matter: students who completed more AOI content tended to have stronger outcomes in misinformation identification, civic online reasoning, and digital communication empathy. Because students were not randomly assigned to different levels of AOI use, these findings are not causal, but they point to the importance of giving students consistent time and support to complete AOI’s core learning activities.

Why this work matters

AOI addresses an urgent need in education: helping students build the skills and confidence to navigate digital information safely, critically, and responsibly. The project generated practical evidence about how a game-based media literacy program can be refined, implemented, and evaluated in authentic classroom settings.

Findings offer insight into how students and teachers experience AOI, where additional supports may strengthen future use, and how game-based learning can support digital citizenship and media literacy instruction across multiple subject areas.

The project also illustrates SRI’s role in partnering with developers to support iterative product development, conduct rigorous mixed-methods evaluation, and generate actionable findings that can inform both product improvement and broader efforts to strengthen students’ digital and media literacy.