Students’ Sourcing While Reading and Writing From Multiple Web Documents

This study focuses on how and to what degree undergraduates attend to source information while reading a set of partly contradicting web documents on a social-scientific issue, and on how students use those sources in writing an essay based on the documents. Think-aloud data collected during the reading session showed that students to some degree pay attention to both source information about the documents and to information about sources embedded in the documents’ content. Sourcing of an evaluative nature occurred most frequently while students read documents holding strong opinions on the issue. In the essays, students most frequently cited the source assumed to be most trustworthy. Students’ explicit online sourcing while reading was significantly related to their explicit references to the web documents in the essays. The results from the study are in accordance with prior studies in indicating that undergraduates need more training in sourcing skills.

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