Learning to Read in a Digital World

Trust and mistrust when students read multiple information sources about climate change

Abstract The present study investigated how undergraduates judged the trustworthiness of different information sources that they read about climate change. Results showed that participants ( N  = 128) judged information from textbook and official documents to be more trustworthy than information from newspapers and a commercial agent. Moreover, participants put most emphasis on content and least emphasis on date of publication when judging document trustworthiness. When judging the trustworthiness of the textbook, they emphasized criteria differently than when evaluating other types of documents. Results also indicated that readers low in topic knowledge were more likely to trust less trust…

Who Said That? Investigating the Plausibility-Induced Source Focusing Assumption with Norwegian Undergraduate Readers

Abstract The present study investigated to what extent encountering a textual claim that contradicts one’s prior beliefs may increase readers’ memory for the source of the information, such as the author or publication. A sample of 71 Norwegian economics and administration undergraduates were presented with texts on cell phones and potential health risks that either concluded that cell phones involve serious health risks or that they are perfectly safe. Results showed that readers’ memory for source feature information increased when the conclusion of the text contradicted the belief that cell phone use poses serious health risks but not when it contradicted the belief that cell phone use d…

Examining the structure of credibility evaluation when sixth graders read online texts

Background Previous research indicates that students lack sufficient online credibility evaluation skills. However, the results are fragmented and difficult to compare as they are based on different types of measures and indicators. Consequently, there is no clear understanding of the structure of credibility evaluation. Objectives The present study sought to establish the structure of credibility evaluation of online texts among 265 sixth graders. Methods Students' credibility evaluation skills were measured with a task in which they read four online texts, two more credible (a popular science text and a newspaper article) and two less credible (a layperson's blog text and a commercial tex…

Summary versus argument tasks when working with multiple documents: Which is better for whom?

Abstract This article reports on two experiments where undergraduates read five documents on a scientific topic and afterwards answered comprehension questions and wrote either summaries or argument essays on the topic. In the first experiment, students who were instructed to work with the documents for the purpose of summarizing their contents displayed better comprehension and integration of document contents than did students instructed to construct arguments from the documents. In the second experiment, focusing on whether the effects of task instructions on multiple-documents comprehension and integration could be moderated by students’ prior knowledge, it was found that only students …

Understanding and Integrating Multiple Science Texts: Summary Tasks are Sometimes Better Than Argument Tasks

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs a…

Adolescents' credibility justifications when evaluating online texts.

AbstractResearch has shown that students differ in their abilities to evaluate the credibility of online texts, and, in general, many perform poorly on online evaluation tasks. This study extended current knowledge by examining students’ abilities to justify the credibility of online texts from different perspectives, thus providing a more nuanced understanding of students’ credibility evaluation ability. We examined how upper secondary school students (N = 73; aged 16 to 17) evaluated author expertise, author intention, the publication venue, and the quality of evidence when reading four texts about the effects of sugar consumption in a web-based environment. Additionally, we examined how …

Comprehension effects of signalling relationships between documents in search engines

A key task for students learning about a complex topic from multiple documents on the web is to establish the existing rhetorical relations between the documents. Traditional search engines such as Google(R) display the search results in a listed format, without signalling any relationship between the documents retrieved. New search engines such as Kartoo(R) go a step further, displaying the results as a constellation of documents, in which the existing relations between pages are made explicit. This presentation format is based on previous studies of single-text comprehension, which demonstrate that providing a graphical overview of the text contents and their relation boosts readers' comp…