The process of using information about documents such as the author, genre, and date of publication while evaluating and interpreting those documents' content was labeled "sourcing" in a seminal paper by Wineburg (1991). Studies in various domains have adapted the term sourcing while referring to central reading skills in modern information societies. In this review, we discuss the concept of sourcing grounded in research from social psychology, information sciences, and text comprehension. Based on that, we reviewed 18 intervention studies in educational settings, in order to identify how sourcing was operationalized in the studies, the nature of the interventions, and how successful they were. The review shows that interventions for younger students emphasized source credibility, whereas interventions among older students also emphasized the role of sourcing in interpretation. None of the studies measured how students search for source features or specifically which features they attend to. Regarding the nature of the studies, the use of multiple partly conflicting documents was common, with that condition positively related to outcome measures. Another characteristic was the use of inquiry tasks. A majority of the studies do not apply findings from persuasion theory and information science indicating that credibility assessment requires effort and motivation. Future interventions should more strongly emphasize the relationship between sourcing and motivation. Recent empirical work has shown that readers' attention to and memory for source information relate to their text-based learning and comprehension (Anmarkrud, Bråten, &

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.

In this quasi‐experimental study, the authors examined the effects of an intervention designed to teach upper secondary school students to take source information, such as author expertise, into consideration when selecting, processing, and using textual resources to complete particular multiple‐document literacy tasks. The intervention centered on a contrasting cases approach framed by authentic curriculum‐based classroom activities and was implemented over six weeks by teachers who had participated in professional development seminars. The findings demonstrated that students who had participated in the sourcing intervention placed more value on source information when selecting texts, invested more time and effort in processing the texts they selected, and more frequently attributed textual ideas to their respective sources compared with students who had participated in typical classroom activities instead. These effects were observed on far transfer tasks in which students worked with multiple documents on different topics in different situational contexts for different purposes, and were sustained over a period of 5.5 weeks. The discussion highlights the uniqueness of the current intervention work and centers on the aspects of the sourcing intervention that likely promoted these broad, sustainable, and transferable sourcing skills in students. Attention is also directed to several possible lines of future research in this area.

One‐hundred and twenty‐seven Norwegian upper‐secondary school students completing college preparatory courses (41% female) were asked to select the texts they wanted to use in order to write a letter to the editor about a socio‐scientific topic, with 60 students assigned the topic of climate change and 67 students assigned the topic of nuclear power. Afterwards, they were asked to justify their text selections, read the selected texts and write their letters to the editor. Across both topics, hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that students' behavioural engagement in the selection, justification, reading and writing tasks contributed to their performance over and above their reading comprehension, topic knowledge and topic interest. Specifically, behavioural engagement in the selection and justification tasks improved the prediction of their content‐based and source‐feature based justifications for text selection, and behavioural engagement in the reading and writing tasks improved the prediction of the content coverage and content integration observed in their written products, with large effect sizes obtained for behavioural engagement across the two topics. The theoretical and educational significance of the study is discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

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