I'm sure this will vary for many people depending on their schools, where/when they were taught, and the like, so I'm interested to see what others' experiences have been with this.
I'm also curious about what resources some have used to learn better research skills & media literacy (and found useful) if their school didn't adequately teach either (or they may have whiffed on it at the time).
Yes. In highschool (Australia) I took Modern History in years 11-12, which was taught by a teacher who really cared about the subject. With a subject like that of course media literacy, arguments, hypothesis's, source accuracy, claims, bias, and everything related to research skills was relevant. It was essentially a practice run for any political science course you would take at university, as the class revolved around submitting one big assessment item each term which was thoroughly researched. I chose the easy route every time and just wrote essays, but if you were the creative type you could make something else to showcase understanding.
During one semester we did a small trip to a university campus in the city so we could gather resources for one of our projects while not hitting any paywalls.
Of course being an elective senior subject in rural Queensland it was only about 15 of us in my class, where my cohort at large was 100 students in total (once people dropped out in Year 10).