Is It True That Students Are Awful at Online Evaluation? Investigating "Better" and "Poorer" Evaluators

• In Event: 35.074 - Digital Literacies and Technology

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to provide a richer understanding of, and an alternative perspective to, prior quantitative work showing that seventh graders struggle with online credibility evaluation (Author, 2018). We sought to authenticate, qualitatively, a multifaceted online credibility perspective established in the prior work. We also sought to describe criteria that seventh graders from the same study used to justify credibly claims when asked to evaluate website information. Findings support a multifaceted credibility evaluation perspective, add additional understandings to this framework, and show that many students treated as “poorer” evaluators in the previous study brought valuable understandings to evaluation that disrupt the dichotomous frameworks used in both the prior study and in many other reading and evaluation studies.

Authors

• Elena Forzani, Boston University

• Julie Anne Corrigan, University of Ottawa