Effectively learning to evaluate sources, especially when conducting online research, is an essential skill for middle-grade students. This article argues that supporting students in learning to evaluate sources must involve using critical consciousness skills to do so, or the evaluation is incomplete. In the article, the authors expand the…

Background/purpose: This study aimed to identify the concept of media literacy among students of media faculties and its application in journalism and media, in light of the efforts exerted to enhance media culture in Jordanian universities, as a result of exposure to a vast amount of information through the media and social media platforms, in…

While learners' evaluations of author trustworthiness have received much attention in prior research, less work has examined how students evaluate information within texts or engage in critique. Specifically, in this exploratory study, we sought to determine how effective higher education students were at engaging in research report critique, a…

Sourcing and intertextual integration skills are critical to the development of young students' digital literacy skills. Sourcing skills include identifying source parameters (e.g., recognizing the author, publication date, publisher) and analyzing the author's expertise. The objective of this study is to investigate which sourcing skills used by…

Critical thinking, trust and confirmation towards social media have become increasingly important in this period called the post-truth era when the reality has become indistinct, is reproduced, and the truth is undermined. The study aimed to examine the prospective teachers' confirmation / trust levels and critical thinking tendencies towards…

Using pre- and post- intervention data, this formative study explores instructional moves designed to guide students' critical thinking as they engage in lateral reading and digital source evaluation. Working in a dual enrollment composition classroom, researchers identified and addressed three areas of need: considering context when determining…

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data…

In a study conducted across an urban school district, we tested a classroom-based intervention in which students were taught online evaluation strategies drawn from research with professional fact checkers. Students practiced the heuristic of "lateral reading": leaving an unfamiliar website to search the open Web before investing…

The authors explored the ways in which students drew on their individual theories of knowledge and knowing, or personal epistemologies, to identify and learn from multiple informational sources found on the internet. Analysis of students' think-aloud reports (during reading) and their written questions (after reading) indicated that students'…

How should pupils use the internet to learn? This essay sets up two modes of using online sources, reading for information and reading for evidence, and evaluates their value for schools. The former is well known; pupils decide whether the source is telling the truth or not. The latter is more familiar in advanced historical investigation, namely…

This eye-tracking study examines how differences in sources' trustworthiness are used by readers to regulate and resolve conflicting scientific claims. One hundred forty-four university students were sequentially presented with two conflicting scientific claims (regarding nanotechnology) across two texts. The claims were indicated to stem from two…

In this paper, I apply the Multiple Documents Text-Based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction (MD-TRACE) model, to describe the types of cognitive processes that students engage to critically reason about social issues, as they are portrayed through mass media. In addition to examining such processes, I further consider the extent to which…

In this research study two professors and a classroom teacher collaborated to develop instructional moves to teach lateral reading, a digital source evaluation technique that involves conducting strategic quick research on sources of information. Results indicated that the introduction of lateral reading made students aware of the need to know…

The current information society requires people to handle information from different sources, which entails specific skills beyond those needed to comprehend and use information from a single text. Given the relevance of becoming a competent reader in functional reading scenarios, it is crucial to examine how contextual-, task-, and…

This paper examines whether model annotations can foster disciplinary literacy in higher education. Using history as a test case, 102 education undergraduates participated in a training and transfer task in which they read two-period documents, and responded to recall and comprehension questions, and to a short essay question requiring historical…