No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Nowadays, almost everyone uses the World Wide Web (WWW) to search for information of any kind. In education, students frequently use the WWW for selecting information to accomplish assignments such as writing an essay or preparing a presentation. The evaluation of sources and information is an important sub-skill in this process. But many students have not yet optimally developed this skill. On the basis of verbal reports, eye-tracking data, and navigation logs this study investigated how novices in the domain of psychology evaluate Internet sources as compared to domain experts. In addition, two different verbal reporting techniques, namely thinking aloud and cued retrospective reporting, were compared in order to examine students' evaluation behavior. Results revealed that domain expertise has an impact on individuals' evaluation behavior during Web search, such that domain experts showed a more sophisticated use of evaluation criteria to judge the reliability of sources and information and selected more reliable information than domain novices. Furthermore, the different verbal reporting techniques did not lead to different conclusions on criteria use in relation to domain expertise, although in general more utterances concerning evaluation of sources and information were expressed during cued retrospective reporting.

The Internet offers readers the unique opportunity to access rich information scenarios, but doing so requires the use of advanced digital reading skills. Examples of such scenarios are searching and acquiring information from multiple sources (e.g., hypertext, images, videos) and participating in the social exchange of information (e.g., web forums, social networks, commenting newspapers). In such scenarios, the reader has to cope with (a) the constantly growing number of available information sources, (b) the different formats in which digital information is presented, and (c) the varying quality of the information available. To deal with these affordances, individuals need to possess reading skills that go beyond what is needed to understand a single text alone. Such advanced reading skills include: (a) search and navigation skills to select relevant web pages and hyperlinks and to avoid getting lost in hyperspace; (b) the ability to integrate multiple pieces of information and multiple presentation formats (texts from different web pages, text and animations); and (c) critical evaluation skills (e.g., assessing the trustworthiness of information on a web page and evaluating the quality of a comment from a social network). Existing literature suggests that children and adolescents possess some of these skills, but that students at all levels struggle to apply them in complex scenarios. In the present chapter, we aim to review the literature regarding the skills needed to master the affordances of advanced digital reading scenarios.