Openness and Participation are critical to democratic citizenship (Knight Commission Report, 2009; Şimşek and Şimşek, 2013). Openness implies that everybody can reach the information that supports civic and personal decisions, which serves to facilitate Participation, that is, joining and using information systems to solve civic and personal issues (Knight Commission Report, 2009). As open and multisource access to information secures these values, it cannot be realistically controlled by democratic governments (Eysenbach, 2008). This emancipation from top-down control forces individual citizens to assume responsibility for their own navigation in the dynamic information landscape (Weiland, 2017). Citizens need to learn how to identify and critically process relevant information (Eysenbach, 2008), and how to position themselves in relation to a myriad of views, values, and ideas (Weiland, 2017). The COVID-19 crisis is one example that clearly showed that citizens were not ready for such navigation.

Soon before the onset of the crisis, vaccine hesitancy, a delay in acceptance, or a refusal of vaccine despite its availability (MacDonald and SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy, 2015; Montagni I. et al., 2021), was listed among the 10 critical global threats by the World Health Organization [WHO] (2019), Okuhara et al. (2020). Hesitant attitudes toward vaccines became increasingly studied during the COVID-19 crisis, showing that they were associated with poor health literacy (Montagni I. et al., 2021; Turhan et al., 2021; in particular, digital health literacy, Patil et al., 2021) and a mismatch between affect-laden anti-vaccination messages and statistics-based governmental communication (Okuhara et al., 2020). In the cognitively and emotionally challenging “infodemic,” understood as an overabundance of information on virus-related matters (Duplaga et al., 2019; World Health Organization [WHO], 2020; Patil et al., 2021), the citizens were left to their own devices. Despite higher-than-ever literacy rates, the public was poorly prepared for universal access to information and failed to assume the responsibilities that come with such access. Paired with poor readiness for selecting, evaluating, and processing information, universal access to information became a threat, not an aid.

Universal access to information is here to stay but using it to individual and societal advantage rather than disadvantage demands better readiness, and it is better to foster it late than never. The notion that the age of access demands specific skills, and that educational systems across the world should support individuals in honing these skills, is not new. For over two decades now, educational psychologists have investigated a myriad of literacy skills (i.e., literacies) that support individual navigation in the dynamically changing information landscape (Cervetti et al., 2006; Şimşek and Şimşek, 2013; Leu et al., 2017). Literacy became a popular buzzword in educational psychology and an umbrella term for multiple, multimodal and multifaceted skills (Cervetti et al., 2006). Literacy for twenty-first century citizenship is digital, complex, and dynamic, but it builds on traditional literacies, such as reading, writing and comprehension (Leu et al., 2017). These traditional literacies need to be applied in the digital world, in which information is no longer provided in a single modality (e.g., audio only), a single flow (e.g., without simultaneous advertising), or by a limited group of individuals sharing similar values, views, and ideas. The line between the addresser and the addressee is fuzzy, as each member of the online community may smoothly move on the continuum between these roles. Therefore, twenty-first century literacies demand not only technical readiness for the modern technologies, but, critically, control over one’s own information seeking and processing, awareness of the complexity of the social world (Cervetti et al., 2006; Leu et al., 2017), and a balance between emotional engagement and emotional distance toward arguments presented by others (Gee, 2012; Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017).

Technical readiness is typically a minor challenge for “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001; Valenza, 2006; Harris, 2008) or “insiders” (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006; Wimmer and Draper, 2019), who are children and adolescents raised amid rapidly evolving technologies from their birth (Neumann, 2016). However, evidence from educational and developmental psychology showed that digital natives, despite technical readiness, lack critical literacy and struggle with seeking, selecting, and evaluating information, and are not by default skilled or critical consumers of information (Valenza, 2006; Harris, 2008; Wineburg et al., 2016). Digital natives typically prioritize most accessible information sources and effortless processing (Shenton and Dixon, 2004; van Deursen et al., 2014; Loh and Kanai, 2015), and show age-specific difficulties in deploying attention to relevant information. Younger children (at 8–10 years) struggle with inhibiting irrelevant yet salient and engaging information (Eastin et al., 2006) and typically do not question its accuracy (Hirsh, 1999); older children lack sufficient knowledge base and analytical skills to contextualize and analyze the information, and often prioritize the form of the information over its content (Watson, 1998; Agosto, 2002; Sundar, 2008). This suggests that critical literacy learning should be adjusted to children’s cognitive developmental stage (Eastin, 2008) and fostered in education (Bernstein, 2000; Gee, 2012; Leu et al., 2017; Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017) because it is central to the new responsibilities that follow from universal access to information. Critical literacy, “the ability to argue from evidence, values and different perspectives (Skolverket., 2011) and to go beyond the individual and personal, and relate knowledge to more general and abstract notions (Bernstein, 2000; Gee, 2012),” as defined by Olin-Scheller and Tengberg (2017, p. 428), must be paired with age-appropriate statistical literacy and scientific literacy to prepare the prospective citizen for the influx of complex, heavily data-based information (Gal, 2002; Organization Economic Cooperation Development [OECD], 2004; Engel, 2017, 2019; Podkul et al., 2020; Engledowl and Weiland, 2021). To this end, in educational settings, complex information should not be simplified, but rather turned into manageable chunks and presented on multiple occasions (Spiro et al., 2003). Comparing poorly presented information, e.g., misleading data visualizations with well-executed visualizations provided by such tools as Engel (2019), Gapminder (2022) should be also a regular part of classroom activities (Engledowl and Weiland, 2021).

Critical literacy relies on cognitive skills, but it cannot be achieved without Students’ emotional investment. Educational psychologists showed that students need to learn how to self-regulate their own investment by striking a balance between emotional engagement and emotional distance toward their own and others’ arguments when discussing social issues (Gee, 2012; Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017). Inhibiting own emotional attitudes is a prerequisite when evaluating own and others’ arguments and can be effectively trained in the classroom context, by, for instance, drawing Students’ attention to the affect-laden but irrelevant arguments that they present in response to a controversial issue (Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017). This requires metacognition, understood as active monitoring of own thoughts and emotions, and switching between own and others’ perspectives (Flavell, 1976). Although this ability develops early (Marulis et al., 2016), it becomes an educational priority only in adolescence (Eysenbach, 2008; Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017). In adolescence, citizens become increasingly autonomous, and drift away from reliance on traditional authority figures (i.e., intermediaries; Eysenbach, 2008) toward support from peers and less authoritative sources of information (i.e., apomediaries; Eysenbach, 2008). Individual autonomy continues to develop in adulthood, and is typically associated with gains in cognitive ability, literacies, and self-efficacy. Low capacity and/or insufficient belief in one’s own capacity can push even adult citizens into reliance on traditional authority figures and uncritical, unreflective processing of information (Eysenbach, 2008). Therefore, critical literacy is only a bare minimum for individual readiness during global crises.

Navigating the information landscape demands critical literacy, paired with other relevant literacies, such as media literacy, health literacy, and statistical literacy. To date, various interventions have aimed to boost relevant literacies in individuals, perhaps stemming from a belief that a sufficiently literate individual will be able to scan, select, and evaluate the information landscape to make thoroughly informed choices. Empirical research findings on human rationality, however, suggest otherwise, showing that literacies are fundamental but not sufficient for individual readiness. Several models of human cognition showed that information processing roughly follows two separate routes: either a peripheral, fast route with mental shortcuts and simple rules (i.e., heuristics) or a central, cognitively effortful route with a reflective, metacognitive outlook on the available information (Sundar, 2008; Stanovich, 2009, 2018). Having access to these two processing routes (or systems, Stanovich, 2009) is highly adaptive, but overreliance on the heuristic route can lead to multiple cognitive biases (Sundar, 2008; Stanovich, 2009). Therefore, people who are sufficiently literate in terms of health and statistical knowledge may nevertheless suffer such cognitive biases (Stanovich, 2018) and make irrational choices as to whether, for example, to vaccinate themselves and/or their children against COVID-19 due to the anti-vaccination messages. The messages are typically communicated through affect-laden, salient imagery focused on vaccine toxicity and its side effects and consequently tend to trigger fast, heuristic processing (Okuhara et al., 2020). Even individuals that reflectively weigh the benefits and risks of the vaccine against the risks of COVID-19 infection may struggle with overriding the worry caused by the heuristic processing of such information (Okuhara et al., 2020).

As the above example showed, cognitive psychologists have repeatedly shown that individuals are prone to the same biases across social strata regardless of their literacy levels, but they may be able to override these biases with sufficient awareness and training (Stanovich, 2018). Instead of resorting to fast, automatic processing that prioritizes ease and speed over rationality, individuals should be able to intentionally choose slow, reflective processing of the information landscape. Educating citizens on the multiple heuristics triggered by salient but irrelevant aspects of communication (Sundar, 2008) may be a good introduction to rational thinking. To some extent, training of rational thinking overlaps with literacy training, as they also involve technical components of statistical and scientific literacy (Stanovich, 2009). Such technical skills involve, among others, learning probability theory, switching between absolute and relative representations of data (e.g., 1,000 individuals vs. 25% of the tested sample vs. 1 in 4 tested people got infected) and overriding an automatic tendency to overestimate absolute numbers compared to percentages (Yamagishi, 1997; Stanovich, 2009). Thus far, however, it seems that citizens, lacking systematic training on this matter, have not had a chance to build an awareness of their own cognitive functioning. Without such chances at a society-wide level, many citizens will not be able to take control over their own cognitive functioning, and, thereby, will not achieve readiness for universal access to information. Their information processing will be governed externally, by those who manipulate vividness, accessibility, and salience of information (Stanovich, 2009), such as advertising companies in the modern market-based society. Thus far, the lack of awareness on own information processing had not threatened the economy, health, and survival, and had been overlooked in education. Now that it is generating considerable economic losses for the local and global communities, it will finally find its way to society-wide educational practices. We thus propose that developing a habit of taking stock of one’s mental operations should become more prominent in the education of children, adolescents, and adults.

Better understanding of one’s own information processing is a goal that demands concrete, structured action, with the concept of (ir)relevance of information at its core (Heine, 2006; Eysenbach, 2008; Hobbs and Jensen, 2009; Román et al., 2009; Olin-Scheller and Tengberg, 2017; Bajo et al., 2021). Identifying relevant information is key for critical and rational thinking, since changes of salient, irrelevant information can significantly impact human decision-making (i.e., framing effect; Stanovich, 2009). This skill has been championed by several scholars in recent years, pointing toward conditions in which students can efficiently take responsibility for handling access to information (Lankes, 2008; Weingarten, 2008; Rapp and McCrudden, 2018). Providing students with information of varying relevance and credibility, both in the classroom and in complex real-world contexts, gives them the best opportunity to determine on their own what matters regarding the information flow (Lankes, 2008; Weingarten, 2008; Rapp and McCrudden, 2018). Furthermore, delegating the responsibility for setting up own sub-goals, and selecting information without micromanaging instruction leads to more accurate relevance judgments (Heine, 2006). One way to achieve such tasks may be to construct self-regulated and metacognitive learning environments where students can figure out their own information processing with the help of technologies in learning analytics (e.g., Winne et al., 2019) and cooperation with interdisciplinary professionals. Completing such tasks may further build Students’ confidence in their own information processing abilities and steer them toward autonomous, critical thinking.