How Can Critical Thinking Be Used to Assess the Credibility of Online Information?

Abstract

The prevalence of unverified information on the internet and the associated potential adverse effect on society led to the development of a number of models and theories to assess the credibility of online information. Existing research consists of two diverse approaches: the first consists of checklist approaches or normative guidelines on how to assess the information whereas the second provides descriptive models and theories of how users actually go about when assessing credibility. The above mentioned approaches consider aspects related to the presentation and content of the information. However, the reasoning in the content is not a concern that is covered in these approaches. Critical thinking is considered an increasingly important 21st century work place skill. This paper investigates the potential value of using critical thinking in assessing the credibility of online information. The paper commences with an overview of existing approaches for assessing the credibility of online information. It then argues that the presence of a well-developed argument in online information to be an indication of credibility. Critical thinking also helps to evaluate the credibility of evidence. These thinking skills can be developed through training. It is shown how a group of first year Information Systems students were able to more critically engage with the content of online news after a course on critical thinking. This paper contributes to the literature on the assessment of the credibility of online information.

Evaluation of Online Information in University Students: Development and Scaling of the Screening Instrument EVON

“…The challenge would then be to construct such websites that would distinguish between moderate and high levels of competence. Given our psychometric results, which show a lack of difficult items, and recent proposals to consider aspects of critical thinking research (van Zyl et al, 2020), the checklist approach may have limited potential to meet this challenge. However, a more promising attempt might be to develop items that require students to identify and evaluate knowledge claims of websites and evidence that speaks for or against these claims.…”

“…According to feature or checklist approaches (Flanagin and Metzger, 2007;Metzger, 2007; see also Chinn and Rinehart, 2016;van Zyl et al, 2020), web users' perception of credibility will depend on their judgments referring to structural (e.g., design features and website complexity), message-based (e.g., accuracy and writing style), and sponsor-based features (e.g., personal experience with the sponsor). The weight given to each feature may vary depending on the genre of website or other circumstances (e.g., websites from news organizations are generally rated more credible than personal websites; Flanagin and Metzger, 2007).…”

“…That means, for example, that a news website should be considered credible not because it is operated by a news agency, but because its journalists produce knowledge claims that are accurate and plausible in their argumentation, which rely on processes of thorough search, evaluation, and synthesis of evidence to produce them. Recent considerations support this view arguing that core components of critical thinking (e.g., evaluating whether a claim is validated by examining the argument surrounding it) can enrich checklist approaches and should be considered to foster students' credibility assessment (van Zyl et al, 2020; see also Stadtler and Bromme, 2014, on strategies to reconcile conflicts about competing scientific claims). Nevertheless, provided that they are closely related to such epistemic processes, structural, message-based, and sponsor-based features are useful markers that present web users with comparatively simple and straightforward ways to assess the credibility of information.…”

Which noncognitive features provide more information about reading performance? A data-mining approach to big educational data

“…Indeed, the question asked in PISA 2018 (ST166) aimed to measure this skill through a vignette in the online environment (OECD, 2018a, p. 13). Since the question in PISA 2018 includes evaluating the credibility of information in the online environment, it is similar to the study of Van Zyl et al (2020). Van Zyl et al (2020) emphasized that assessing the credibility of information in the online environment can only be realized with critical thinking skills.…”