Students' reliance on surface-level evaluation strategies declined after the modules, including trust in dot-org domains, links, appearance, and About pages¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2021 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Belief that a dot-org domain conferred reliability fell from 23 students at pretest to 7 at posttest, a decrease of 69%, with similar declines for links, appearance, and About-page reliance. → Breakstone 2021

Evidence¶

Breakstone 2021¶

Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Connors, P., Ortega, T., Kerr, D., & Wineburg, S. (2021). Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-56

q2 · i? · causal · r1

Coded strategy analysis of pretest and posttest responses to the climate-change website task. The article also reports links-based judgments fell from 21 to 7, appearance-based from 14 to 4, and About-page reliance from 14 to 2; the modules "directly addressed why each of the above strategies could lead to erroneous conclusions."

"At pretest, 23 students believed that a dot-org domain conferred reliability, a misconception common not only among college students but among adults (Wineburg & Ziv, 2019). On the posttest, the number fell to seven, a decrease of 69%."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Critical Thinking — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Civic Online Reasoning Instruction Improves Evaluation — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Computing students hold persistent incorrect beliefs, basing trust judgments on cues no longer reliable to guarantee trustworthiness — related
• One-session checklist (CRAAP) instruction in source evaluation did no better than the alternative methods it was compared with in two quasi-experiments — related
• Transparency about AI involvement appeared to function as an instructional intervention, shifting student reflection from feedback quality toward authority, trust, and assessment legitimacy — related
• After the modules, students engaged in lateral reading far more often, rising from 3 of 87 students at pretest to 67 of 87 at posttest — related
• Surface validation can function while substantive validation fails: most participants detected flawed AI recommendations yet continued following them — related