This study investigated the effects of author expertise and content relevance on Norwegian secondary school students’ (n = 190) selection, processing, and use of multiple documents. Participants were presented with documents that pertained to more or less familiar topics, and received brief instructions that highlighted the importance of source credibility or content relevance, whereas those in a control group just received a general task instruction (to write a letter to the editor about their assigned topic). Results showed that content relevance had strong and nearly identical effects on students’ selection, processing, and use of documents independently of whether the topic was more or less familiar, whereas they valued author expertise to a greater extent when the topic was less familiar. Moreover, content relevance had a strong effect on students’ selection, processing, and use of documents independently of instructional condition, whereas brief instructions to focus on source credibility increased the value placed on author expertise when students selected, processed, and used documents for the less familiar topic. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesized model that specified direct and indirect effects of textual and individual factors on readers' ability to integrate information about sources and content when reading multiple conflicting texts on a controversial socio-scientific issue. Using a path analytic approach with a sample of 140 Norwegian upper secondary school students, it was found that the textual factor of presentation format, specifically whether they read about the conflicting issue in multiple texts or in a single text, affected source-content integration directly as well as indirectly through memory for textual conflicts. Thus, compared to interacting with a single text, interacting with multiple texts improved students' sourcing performance directly as well as indirectly. Further, the individual factors of prior knowledge and gender affected source-content integration directly, with prior knowledge also having an indirect effect that was mediated by memory for textual conflicts. Specifically, students with higher prior knowledge and girls were likely to display better sourcing performance than were students with lower prior knowledge and boys, and prior knowledge also had an indirect positive effect on sourcing via memory for textual conflicts. Theoretical as well as educational implications of the findings are discussed.

This study investigated whether memory for conflicting information predicted mental representation of source-content links (i.e., who said what) in a sample of 86 Norwegian adolescent readers. Participants read four texts presenting conflicting claims about sun exposure and health. With differences in gender, prior knowledge, and interest controlled for, and with self-reported critical reading strategies also included in a multiple regression analysis, it was found that the better participants remembered that the texts presented conflicting claims on the issue, the more likely they were to include source-content links in their mental representations of the texts. Theoretical and educational implications of the findings are discussed, and directions for future research are provided.

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Peer-reviewed articleUndervisning i en sammansatt textvärld: En intervjustudie med svenska och norska gymnasielärare om undervisning i kritisk läsning och kritisk värdering av källinformation Eva Wennås Brante* and Elisabeth Stang Lund Department of Education, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway AbstractVia Internet har elever möjlighet att söka information om de flesta ämnen, samtidigt har ansvaret för att bedöma tillförlitligheten av den funna informationen i större grad hamnat hos eleven. Utvärder-ing av källinformation och förståelse av innehåll i dokument är växelvis beroende av varandra och elever behöver uppmärksamma samt använda tillgänglig källinformation om dokument vid läsning och tolkning av innehåll för att konstruera en integrerad mental modell över flera dokument. I denna studie har det via intervjuer undersökts hur gymnasielärare i Norge och Sverige förhåller sig till undervisning i källhantering och kritiskt granskande av källor. Dessutom undersöktes ifall de två grupperna av lärare resonerade likartat eller ej, då de nationella styrdokumenten skiljer sig åt. Intervjuerna har analyserats tematiskt. Två huvudteman identifierades. De norska lärarna reflekterar över hur kritiskt läsande och kritisk källhantering passar eller inte passar in i norskämnet, medan de svenska lärarna talar om att uppfylla kunskapskrav från läroplanerna gällande dessa företeelser. Att medvetet använda källinformation för att predicera, granska och utvärdera innehåll vid läsning och därmed skapa en integrerad mental modell över flera dokument förekommer sparsamt. Den senare strategin bör främjas i ett informationssamhälle där motstridiga texter av skiftande kvalitet och relevans publiceras på Internet. Nyckelord: Kritiskt läsande; kritisk källhantering; källinformation; intervjuer; gymnasieskola AbstractIn a modern textual world, the internet provides student with access to a wide range of information resources. Meanwhile, it is often up to the individual student to evaluate the quality of documents found on the internet. Reading, understanding and evaluating content information is dependent on attending to and evaluating source information. Therefore, students need to use documents' source information, along with documents' content, to construct an integrated mental model based on multiple document reading. Based on this, we set out to interview Norwegian and Swedish upper secondary school teachers. The topic was how they approached teaching critical reading and sourcing *Correspondence to: Eva Wennås Brante, Department of Education, University of Oslo, P.O.Box 1092, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: e.w.brante@iped.uio.no 2017 Eva Wennås Brante and Elisabeth Stang Lund. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the or...