Examining adolescents' ability to assess credibility in online reading
Submitted by:
Hyesun Paik
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to explore middle school students' perceptions of credibility assessment in an internet reading environment and to measure their ability to assess credibility. Credibility assessment has become more important and complex in the reading of Internet materials as changes in the digital environment have transformed the way texts are produced and distributed. In the traditional print media environment, credibility assessment of texts is limited to aspects of the internal structure or content of the text, or is based on an identifiable speaker or writer(Kim & Son, 2016). However, in internet reading, assessing credibility is not as easy as finding the author's information. Recent studies have shown that secondary learners struggle to integrate source information in texts and write reflectively about it (Kilii, Brante, Räikkönen, & Coiro, 2020; Pérez, et al., 2018).
This study included 229 students from two middle schools in a large city and a medium-sized city. Students participated in a survey on assessing credibility in online reading and a reading task on assessing credibility. Students read three online sources and rated them on recency, relevance to the assignment, author's expertise, accuracy of content, and objectivity of perspective.
While middle school students perceive credibility assessment as important, they are only moderately likely to check sources or identify sources of quoted material in their online reading. When it comes to actual credibility assessments, students are good at determining surface-level recency and author authority, but struggle to assess credibility by exploring content, such as the accuracy of the content or the objectivity of the point of view.
Despite the increase in online reading, this study shows that adolescents have difficulty assessing the credibility of online sources. Therefore, it is important to develop educational approaches to help students carefully analyze high and low credibility texts from a variety of perspectives.