Digital Literacy Empowering College Students’ Information Resilience: Generative Mechanisms and Cultivation Pathways

Abstract

Educational digitalization has placed college students in a newly constituted informational condition: the expansion of information supply does not automatically enhance judgment, and the convenience of obtaining answers may even conceal the difficulty of forming understanding. Therefore, the core issue of digital literacy education can no longer remain at the level of tool mastery, resource access, or platform adaptation. It must further ask whether college students can form stable judgment, accomplish cognitive repair, and assume communicative responsibility amid algorithmic recommendation, generative content, information cocoons, online risks, and mixed value claims. Information resilience is a conceptual response to this problem. It is neither psychological endurance in a general sense nor a simple extension of traditional information literacy. Rather, it refers to the comprehensive capacity of college students to identify risks, evaluate evidence, adjust behavior, restore judgment, and reconstruct an order of action in complex digital information environments. Digital literacy empowers information resilience insofar as digital knowledge, technical skills, information evaluation, ethical awareness, and subjective reflection are reorganized within risk situations. Based on a review of relevant studies, this paper explains the generative mechanisms through which digital literacy empowers college students’ information resilience and proposes cultivation pathways in terms of curriculum systems, authentic tasks, support networks, platform governance, and developmental evaluation. The paper argues that the real task of digital literacy education in higher education is not to enable students to obtain answers more quickly, but to enable them to form their own judgment in the presence of answers.