Improving university students' web savvy: An intervention study.

BACKGROUND Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and political issues. However, they struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information they encounter online. AIMS This pilot study investigated whether a focused curricular intervention could improve university students' ability to make sound judgements of credibility. SAMPLE Participants (n = 67) were students in four sections of a 'critical thinking and writing' course at a university on the West Coast of the United States. Course sections were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 29) and control conditions (n = 38). METHODS We conducted a pre-and-posttest, treatment/control experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 design (treatment condition × order × time) with repeated measures on the last factor. Students in the treatment group received two 75-min lessons on evaluating the credibility of online content. An assessment of online reasoning was administered to students 6 weeks prior to the intervention and again 5 weeks after. RESULTS Students in the treatment group were significantly more likely than students in the control group to have shown gains from pretest to posttest. CONCLUSIONS Results suggest that teaching students a small number of flexible heuristics that can be applied across digital contexts can improve their evaluation of online sources.

[1]  Ryen W. White,et al.  Understanding web browsing behaviors through Weibull analysis of dwell time , 2010, SIGIR.

[2]  M. Smith.  Cognitive Validity: Can Multiple-Choice Items Tap Historical Thinking Processes? , 2017 .

[3]  S. Wineburg,et al.  Can Students Evaluate Online Sources? Learning From Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning , 2018 .

[4]  Sue Bennett,et al.  The 'digital natives' debate: A critical review of the evidence , 2008, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[5]  Julie Coiro,et al.  Using The Psychometric Characteristics Of Multiple-Choice, Open Internet, And Closed (Simulated) Internet Formats To Refine The Development of Online Research and Comprehension Assessments In Science: Year Three of The ORCA Project , 2012 .

[6]  David M Erceg-Hurn,et al.  Modern robust statistical methods: an easy way to maximize the accuracy and power of your research. , 2008, The American psychologist.

[7]  Sarit Barzilai,et al.  Epistemic Thinking in Action: Evaluating and Integrating Online Sources , 2012 .

[8]  Lucia Mason,et al.  Epistemic evaluation and comprehension of web-source information on controversial science-related topics: Effects of a short-term instructional intervention , 2014, Comput. Educ..

[9]  Sam Wineburg.  Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) , 2018 .

[10]  S. Livingstone.  Media Literacy , 2004, Building Resilience in Children and Teens.

[11]  R. Shavelson,et al.  On the Validity of Cognitive Interpretations of Scores From Alternative Concept-Mapping Techniques , 2001 .

[12]  Seth Ashley,et al.  Developing a News Media Literacy Scale , 2013 .

[13]  S. Wineburg.  Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence , 1991 .

[14]  Eva Wennås Brante,et al.  Sourcing in Text Comprehension: a Review of Interventions Targeting Sourcing Skills , 2018 .

[15]  Denise E. Agosto.  A model of young people's decision-making in using the Web , 2002 .

[16]  P. Kirschner,et al.  Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education , 2013 .

[17]  M. Prensky.  Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1 , 2001 .

[18]  Ivan K. Ash,et al.  Source Evaluation, Comprehension, and Learning in Internet Science Inquiry Tasks , 2009 .

[19]  Joel Breakstone.  Try, Try, Try Again: The Process of Designing New History Assessments , 2014 .

[20]  Lindsay Fullerton,et al.  Trust Online: Young Adults' Evaluation of Web Content , 2010 .

[21]  Edgar Brunner,et al.  Nonparametric analysis of longitudinal data in factorial experiments , 2012 .

[22]  Edgar Brunner,et al.  Nonparametric methods in factorial designs , 2001 .

[23]  Anna Potocki,et al.  Fostering teenagers' assessment of information reliability: Effects of a classroom intervention focused on critical source dimensions , 2018, Learning and Instruction.

[24]  S. Wineburg,et al.  Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information , 2019, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[25]  David Reinking,et al.  Obstacles to Developing Digital Literacy on the Internet in Middle School Science Instruction , 2013 .

[26]  Brent Auernheimer,et al.  Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe? , 2009 .

[27]  S. Wineburg,et al.  History Assessments of Thinking: A Validity Study , 2018, Cognition and Instruction.

[28]  Yvonne Kammerer,et al.  Fostering secondary-school students' intertext model formation when reading a set of websites: The effectiveness of source prompts , 2016, Comput. Educ..

[29]  Saskia Brand-Gruwel,et al.  Fostering students’ evaluation behaviour while searching the internet , 2013 .

[30]  WalravenAmber,et al.  How students evaluate information and sources when searching the World Wide Web for information , 2009 .

[31]  Thorsten Joachims,et al.  In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..