Key Issues in Sourcing in the Digital Age: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors

• In Event: Sourcing: Identifying and Evaluating Information in the Digital Age

Abstract

Objective

To discuss challenges for sourcing in digital contexts and how sourcing may vary with individual and contextual factors.

Theoretical Frame

Across technologies, printed as well as digital, sourcing involves attending to, evaluating, and using available or accessible information about the source of documents, for example, about author or document type (Strømsø et al., 2013). However, because digital technologies are unprecedented in their demands on students to learn from sources that express conflicting views on controversial issues, and because the credibility of those sources is more often a key issue, evaluation of sources has become a more essential part of students’ critical reading and learning, not least when encountering competing knowledge claims about controversial socio-scientific issues (Bråten & Braasch, under review).

Methods

We reviewed research on sourcing conducted in the last decade, with a focus on particular challenges implied by digital contexts and the individual and situational factors that matter in such contexts.

Results

Within digital technologies, professional gate keeping is often lacking, with posted information seldom undergoing extensive quality control. Therefore, judgments of trustworthiness are often left with individual learners. Additionally, source feature information is often masked, unavailable, or hard to interpret in digital media (Flanagin & Metzger, 2008). Thus, while the abundance of readily available information offers new opportunities, it also requires increased vigilance about digital resources as socially constructed artifacts. This indicates that learning within digital technologies may not be equally beneficial for all students.

Regarding individual factors, there is evidence that working memory, prior knowledge, implicit theories of intelligence, epistemic beliefs, prior attitudes, and motivation contribute to critical evaluation of sources when reading about controversial issues on the Internet (Andreassen & Bråten, 2014; Barzilai & Eseth-Alkalai, 2015; Braasch et al., 2014; Kammerer et al., 2015; Van Strien et al., 2014).

Regarding contextual factors, the assumption that attention to source information increases when sources provide discrepant accounts (Braasch et al., 2012) has received support when students read multiple Web-based documents varying in reliability (Kammerer & Gerjet, 2014). Moreover, McCrudden et al. (in press) demonstrated the importance of topic familiarity for students selecting information resources about controversial issues, finding that students distinguished much less between high and low author expertise when selecting documents for a more familiar topic than for a less familiar topic, with content relevance tending to overshadow author expertise in a familiar context. However, other research (Bråten et al., under revision) has indicated that students may disregard source information irrespective of variations in contextual factors.

Scholarly Significance

Arguably, the nature of critical sourcing skills and the individual and contextual factors that affect them may be essentially the same across technologies; however, the roles of individual and contextual factors might increase because of new challenges posed by digital media technologies. It is therefore essential to better understand individual and contextual factors underlying students’ sourcing skills, in particular their abilities to flexibly balance the criteria of content relevance and source trustworthiness when selecting and using information resources on controversial issues in digital inquiry contexts.

Authors

• Ivar Braten, University of Oslo

• Jason Braasch, The University of Memphis

• Matthew T. McCrudden, Victoria University of Wellington