Source evaluation behaviours of first-year university students

Researchers at Brigham Young University studied first-year students’ information evaluation behaviours of open-access, popular news-based, non-academic source material on a variety of subjects. Using think-aloud protocols and screen-recording, researchers coded most and least used evaluation behaviours. Students most used an article’s sources, previous experience with the source or subject matter, or a bias judgement to decide whether the source was reliable. Researchers also compared what students said was important when evaluating information vs. what behaviours students actually exhibited and found significant differences between the two. Namely, students did not think their previous experience or bias judgement affected the way they assessed sources; however, both behaviours played prominently in their observed source evaluation techniques across the study.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Journal of Information Literacy

• Publication date

  2018-12-04

• Fields of study

  Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.11645/12.2.2512
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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