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'…

This paper describes the strategies 8th graders used to evaluate the credibility of unfamiliar websites after a curricular intervention. Website topics were somewhat contested, and students could navigate the open web in order to assess the credibility of the sites. Findings reveal that students were more likely to leave the presented webpages and…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

This case study used screen-capture technology and a cued retrospective think aloud called the "virtual revisit think aloud" to understand teachers' self-directed online learning (SDOL) experiences. Three elementary teachers were involved in a series of in-depth, one-on-one SDOL sessions where they informally used the Internet for their…

Many studies show that a large percentage of students lack the digital competencies to solve information problems using the internet. To address this problem, researchers have developed models to structure the process. However, we maintain that it is first necessary to understand how students actually search for information online when solving an…

Bilingual adolescents actively participate in literacy practices on the multilingual Internet. However, research has paid little attention to these readers' use of their linguistic knowledge and skills as they choose and learn from multilingual resources on the Internet. With think-aloud protocols, this study examined how Korean-English bilingual…

This doctoral dissertation explores diverse facets of online research and comprehension among college students with English as a second or foreign language (L2 students). The research involves three distinct investigations within this overarching theme. Firstly, the study delves into the online reading and writing practices employed by Korean L2…

Nowadays, almost everyone uses the World Wide Web (WWW) to search for information of any kind. In education, students frequently use the WWW for selecting information to accomplish assignments such as writing an essay or preparing a presentation. The evaluation of sources and information is an important sub-skill in this process. But many students…

Self-perception, which mediates between knowledge and behavior, increasingly plays an important role in the determination of the ability to comprehend and respond to information on the Internet. Teachers need to gain insights about how EFL readers feel about themselves as readers in the Internet-based learning environment. There is a critical need…

In this age of real and fake news, students need to be able to assess the trustworthiness of evidence. The authors' current research examines students' use of evidence in secondary social studies classrooms as students deliberate contemporary public policy issues. The authors found that students shifted their evaluations of the trustworthiness of…

Within the context of exploring an ill-structured task using the Google search engine, this study examined (a) the connections between general epistemic beliefs and the complexity of learners' knowledge exploration processes (i.e., learning complexity) and (b) the role of activating learners' task-oriented epistemic beliefs (i.e., epistemic…

To be an informed citizen in today's information-rich environment, individuals must be able to evaluate information they encounter on the Internet. However, teachers currently have limited options if they want to assess students' evaluations of digital content. In response, we created a range of short tasks that assess students' "civic online…

With the advent of Web 2.0 media, there is a greater prevalence of science misinformation available to the public. This issue is particularly problematic for novices who often believe that science in the media is factual and objective, even though an expected outcome of secondary education is to develop students' abilities to critically evaluate…

Using the Internet for vocabulary development is a powerful way for students to rapidly expand their vocabularies. The Internet affords students opportunities to interact both instantaneously and multimodaly with words in different contexts. By using search engines and hyperlinks, students can immediately access textual, visual, and auditory…

There is a lack of research which examines the effects of online pop-up dictionaries in the context of less commonly taught languages including Japanese as a second and foreign language (JSL and JFL), despite the growing popularity of such tools. This qualitatively-oriented study is an attempt to fill this void. The study investigates differences…