How Good Is This Page? Benefits and Limits of Prompting on Adolescents’ Evaluation of Web Information Quality

2019

International audience; The present study examined adolescents' detection of features that affect the quality of Web information. In Experiment 1, participants (12-16 years old) rated the goodness/usefulness of four Web-like documents for a simulated study assignment. Each document came with an issue that potentially undermined its quality. Two documents had source-related issues (i.e., non-competent author, outdated) and two had content-related issues (i.e., topic mismatch, poor readability). Most students failed to notice the issues, including topic mismatch. The participants also produced inconsistent evaluations of topic-match, readability, author competence and currency. In Experiment …