Stanford Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, California, USA.
Br J Educ Psychol. 2019 Sep;89(3):485-500. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12279. Epub 2019 Apr 16.
Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and political issues. However, they struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information they encounter online.
This pilot study investigated whether a focused curricular intervention could improve university students' ability to make sound judgements of credibility.
Participants (n = 67) were students in four sections of a 'critical thinking and writing' course at a university on the West Coast of the United States. Course sections were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 29) and control conditions (n = 38).
We conducted a pre-and-posttest, treatment/control experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 design (treatment condition × order × time) with repeated measures on the last factor. Students in the treatment group received two 75-min lessons on evaluating the credibility of online content. An assessment of online reasoning was administered to students 6 weeks prior to the intervention and again 5 weeks after.
Students in the treatment group were significantly more likely than students in the control group to have shown gains from pretest to posttest.
Results suggest that teaching students a small number of flexible heuristics that can be applied across digital contexts can improve their evaluation of online sources.
年轻人越来越倾向于在互联网上获取有关社会和政治问题的信息。然而，他们在评估所遇到的在线信息的可信度方面存在困难。
本初步研究旨在调查有针对性的课程干预是否可以提高大学生对可信度的正确判断能力。
参与者（n=67）是美国西海岸一所大学的“批判性思维与写作”课程四个班级的学生。课程班级被随机分配到实验组（n=29）和对照组（n=38）。
我们采用 2×2×2 设计（处理条件×顺序×时间）进行了前后测试、处理/对照实验，并在最后一个因素上进行了重复测量。实验组学生接受了两堂 75 分钟的课程，内容是评估在线内容的可信度。在干预前 6 周和干预后 5 周，对学生进行了在线推理评估。
实验组学生比对照组学生更有可能在从前测到后测中表现出进步。
结果表明，教授学生一些可以跨数字环境应用的灵活启发式方法可以提高他们对在线资源的评估能力。
