Students' abilities to evaluate the credibility of online texts: The role of internet‐specific epistemic justifications

Abstract

Previous evaluation studies have rarely used authentic online texts and investigated upper secondary school students' use of evaluation criteria and deep reasoning. The associations between internet‐specific epistemic justifications for knowing and credibility evaluation of online texts are not yet fully understood among adolescents. This study investigated upper secondary school students' (N = 372) abilities to evaluate self‐selected authentic online texts and the role of internet‐specific epistemic justifications in students' evaluation performance when solving a health‐related information problem. Students selected three texts with Google Custom Search Engine and evaluated their credibility. Students' evaluation performance across the three texts was determined according to the different aspects evaluated (author, venue, intentions, evidence and corroboration) and the depth of their evaluations. Students also filled in the Internet‐Specific Epistemic Justifications (ISEJ) inventory previously validated with pre‐service teachers. The results revealed considerable differences in students' abilities to evaluate online texts. Students' beliefs in justification by authority and justification by multiple sources positively predicted their evaluation performance similarly in both topics. The findings suggest that the ISEJ inventory is also valid for upper secondary school students. Students should be explicitly taught to evaluate different credibility aspects and scaffolded to deeply engage with online information.

Adolescents’ credibility justifications when evaluating online texts

“…Our results showed that prior topic knowledge explained 6% of the variance in students' performance with respect to credibility justifications. Although prior topic knowledge has been shown to have a relatively large effect on reading comprehension (McCarthy, & McNamara, 2021), its contribution to credibility justifications seemed to be considerably smaller, which is consistent with previous studies among adolescents (Forzani, 2018;Hämäläinen et al, 2021). Presumably, there are other types of prior knowledge, such as knowledge about sources, genres, or evidence types, that may play a role in credibility judgments beyond prior knowledge about the content of the texts.…”

“…Even though adolescents may be aware of the need to evaluate online information, their skills may vary in sophistication (Bråten, Brante, et al, 2018;Bråten, Stadtler, et al, 2018;Freeman et al, 2020), as may their commitment to invest the effort required to evaluate the information they find online (List & Alexander, 2018;Paul et al, 2017). Previous research has reported inter-individual differences in students' evaluations of source expertise (Coiro et al, 2015;Kammerer et al, 2021), benevolence (Kiili et al, 2018;Potocki et al, 2020), and quality of evidence (Hämäläinen et al, 2021;Jacobsen et al, 2018). Several cognitive factors, such as prior knowledge and attitudes (e.g., Bråten et al, 2011;van Strien et al, 2016), and motivational and affective factors, such as self-efficacy and emotions (Andreassen & Bråten, 2013;Martel et al, 2020), may explain these differences.…”

“…A think-aloud study by Kammerer et al (2021) found that undergraduates' beliefs in justification by authority positively predicted comments regarding source evaluation while reading search results and websites on a controversial health issue. Another study (Hämäläinen et al, 2021), including more than three hundred upper secondary school students, examined associations between Internet-specific justification beliefs and students' evaluation performance when using online information to solve a problem concerning either vaccines or saturated fats. Across both topics, students who believed that knowledge claims should be justified by authority or multiple sources performed better when asked to evaluate the credibility of selfselected online texts.…”

“…We also examined the potential contributions of prior topic knowledge, Internet-specific epistemic justifications, and behavioral engagement to the quality of students' justifications for their credibility evaluations. Based on previous research, we expected students' prior topic knowledge (Bråten et al, 2011;Forzani, 2018), Internet-specific epistemic justification beliefs (e.g., Hämäläinen et al, 2021;Kammerer et al, 2021), and behavioral engagement (Bråten, Brante, et al, 2018;Goldhammer et al, 2014) to be positively associated with credibility justifications. Specifically, we addressed the following research questions:…”

“…The measure was adapted by translating it to Finnish and contextualizing the items in terms of general school tasks. The Finnish adaptation of this measure has been shown to validly measure Internetspecific epistemic justification beliefs among Finnish upper secondary school students (Hämäläinen et al, 2021).…”