Promoting Web-Source Evaluation and Comprehension of Conflicting Online Documents: Effects of Classroom Interventions

This study examines the effectiveness of two short-term instructional interventions on the evaluation of digital sources in the classroom context. One hundred sixty-one 8th graders were involved in one of three conditions: an intervention based on providing declarative knowledge (DK) on source evaluation, an intervention based on providing contrasting cases (CC) of source evaluation strategies, and a control condition (C) with no intervention. Students in both intervention conditions carried out a series of activities in two lessons. Prior topic knowledge and interest, reading comprehension, working memory, and perceived competence in online information search and evaluation were used as control variables to ensure the equivalence of participants across conditions. In all conditions, participants were asked to read four documents on the debated issue of the potential health risks associated with the use of the mobile phone and, after reading, to rank-order them for reliability, providing justifications for their rank-ordering, and to write a short essay to judge those health risks, based on the texts read. The findings indicate that both interventions were effective, to some extent, in promoting the use of source characteristics in reliability judgments, as revealed by the justifications provided by the students for motivating their rank-ordering of the read documents. Both interventions were also effective in supporting multiple-text comprehension as revealed by the students’ argumentation in short essays.