ERIC Number: EJ1442778
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2196-7091
Available Date: N/A
Investigation of Students' Use of Online Information in Higher Education Using Eye Tracking
Ann-Kathrin Kunz; Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia; Susanne Schmidt; Marie-Theres Nagel; Sebastian Brückner
Smart Learning Environments, v11 Article 44 2024
To successfully learn using freely available (and non-curated) Internet resources, university students need to search for, critically evaluate and select online information, and verify sources (defined as Critical Online Reasoning, COR). Recent research indicates substantial deficits in COR skills among higher education students. To support students in learning how to critically use online information for their learning, it is necessary to better understand the strategies and practices that might elicit less critically-reflective judgments about online information and thus account for such deficits. To this end, using eye tracking data, we investigate how the COR behaviors of students who critically-reflectively evaluate the credibility of online information ('high performers') differ from those of students who do not critically-reflectively evaluate it ('low performers'): 19 students were divided into high and low performers according to their performance in the newly developed Critical Online Reasoning Assessment (CORA). The fixation and dwell times of both groups during CORA task processing were compared regarding time spent on the different processing steps and eye movements on the visited web pages. The results show noticeable differences between the two groups, indicating that low performers indeed approached the task rather heuristically than systematically, and that COR skills require targeted and effective training in higher education.
Descriptors: Higher Education, Eye Movements, Online Systems, Internet, Student Behavior, Credibility, Reflection, Critical Thinking, Information Literacy, Digital Literacy
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A