Understanding and Promoting Upper-Secondary School Students Critical Reading and Learning in the 21st Century Information Society

A major 21st century educational goal is developing students' critical reading and learning, which include critical source evaluation skills. Source evaluation refers to judgments about the trustworthiness of sources of information based on strategic atte ntion to source features, such as the author or publisher. While source evaluation seems essential for critical reading and learning, many researchers and practitioners are concerned that students' source evaluation skills do not meet the challenges of the new information literacy landscape, especially when they read about ill-structured problems in the form of controversial social-scientific issues. Our project addresses this broad educational issue by providing new understanding of factors that affect h ow such skills develop and their importance to learning processes and learning outcomes. By designing an intervention to promote students' source evaluation, it will also generate guidelines for essential pedagogical innovations. Specifically, we address the following questions: First, how are individual and textual factors involved in students' source evaluation when reading about a controversial social-scientific issue? Second, to what extent do students use and distinguish between the relevance of content information and the trustworthiness of sources as bases for judging the usefulness of textual resources? Third, how can students' acquisition and application of more sophisticated source evaluation strategies be effectively and efficiently promoted? Participants were Norwegian upper-secondary school students. The intervention designed to address question three also involved professional development for participating teachers. In 2015, data were collected and analyzed for a study addressing question number 2. This study has so far resulted in two articles, published in 2016. Results show that emphasis on source information varied with students' familiarity with the topic, specifically that students took authors' expertise more into consideration when they themselves were less familiar with the topic. Data for a follow-up study including 250 students were collected in the fall of 2015, resulting in another article that was published in the leading international journal Reading Research Quarterly (2018). This article additionally shows that an instruction urging students to take source information into consideration made them put more emphasis on author expertise when they selected and used texts during a writing task. Moreover, we have constructed materials and conducted two studies that address question number 1. The first study, which was published in the journal Reading Psychology in 2017, included 80 upper secondary school students and showed that the more students noted that the texts included conflicting claims on the same issue, the more able they were to link textual contents to the respective sources (i.e., to remember who said what). The other study (with 140 students), which is accepted in the journal Reading & Writing and will be published in 2019, showed that it is easier to pay attention to conflicting claims when these are presented in several different texts than when they are presented in one and the same text. Again, it was found that paying attention to the existence of conflicting claims contributed to students? memory for source information. In the fall of 2016 we also completed the intervention study that was implemented to address question number 3. Analysis of the data from this study was performed in 2017, and the study based on these data is now accepted for publication in Reading Research Quarterly. This study is one of the first to demonstrate that not only immediate but also longer term effects on students? sourcing skills can be obtained. Moreover, these effects were demonstrated on a range of assessments distributed across the selection, reading, and writing phases of multiple document use.

Dette prosjektet er et av de første som viser at det er mulig å oppnå langtidseffekter av undervisning i kritisk kildevurdering i videregående skole. Disse positive effektene viste seg når det gjaldt elevenes valg av tekster, samt når det gjaldt deres lesing av disse tekstene og bruk av kilder i skriftlige oppgaver.

A major 21st century educational goal is developing students' critical reading and learning, which include critical source evaluation skills. Source evaluation refers to judgments about the trustworthiness of sources of information based on strategic atte ntion to source features, such as the author or publisher. While source evaluation seems essential for critical reading and learning, many researchers and practitioners are concerned that students' source evaluation skills do not meet the challenges of th e new information literacy landscape, especially when they read about ill-structured problems in the form of controversial social-scientific issues. Our project addresses this broad educational issue by providing new understanding of factors that affect h ow such skills develop and their importance to learning processes and learning outcomes. By designing an intervention to promote students' source evaluation, it will also generate guidelines for essential pedagogical innovations. Specifically, we address the following questions: First, how are individual and textual factors involved in students' source evaluation when reading about a controversial social-scientific issue? Second, to what extent do students use and distinguish between the relevance of cont ent information and the trustworthiness of sources as bases for judging the usefulness of textual resources? Third, how can students' acquisition and application of more sophisticated source evaluation strategies be effectively and efficiently promoted? P articipants will be Norwegian upper-secondary school students. For expert comparison, a sample of librarians and journalists will also be included in studies addressing question one, and for cross-cultural comparison, a sample of New Zealand upper-seconda ry school students will be included in studies addressing question two. The intervention designed to address question three will also involve professional development for participating teachers.