Hoax-Verification Literacy among Elementary-School Children: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Generation Alpha children encounter digital misinformation from an early age, yet their cognitive readiness to critically verify such content remains underdeveloped. This study aims to map the hoax-verification capabilities of elementary school students and the contextual factors shaping them. A narrative literature review was conducted using Google Scholar for peer-reviewed publications from 2020 to 2025. The final corpus comprised 38 sources, including [insert number, e.g., 14] direct empirical studies on elementary students, alongside theoretical frameworks, policy reports, and indirect evidence from other populations. Thematic analysis indicates that students' verification competence is primarily assessed through self-report and conceptual inference, with a scarcity of performance-based tasks. Findings suggest that young learners predominantly rely on adult consultation and emotional-evaluative reasoning, while autonomous strategies like crossreferencing remain rare. Verification competence appears to be associated with cognitive maturity, parental mediation quality, and school-based instruction, though the certainty of these associations is limited by the heterogeneity of study designs, age groups, and national contexts. Preliminary evidence highlights the critical role of social scaffolding and active parental mediation in fostering verification skills. However, due to the reliance on a single database and the lack of longitudinal, performance-based studies, these findings represent an indicative mapping rather than definitive estimates of prevalence or intervention effectiveness. Future research should prioritize rigorous, context-specific empirical designs.