The Problem With Perspective: Students’ and Teachers’ Reasoning About Credibility During Discussions of Online Sources

Abstract

High school students need support learning to evaluate online information. Scholarship in the last several years has explored how to provide this support via lessons that explicitly teach evaluation strategies. In this study, we analyzed classroom conversations in two high school government classrooms during lessons that taught lateral reading, the strategy of leaving a website or post to investigate its source via external resources. Although lessons taught students to read laterally, they did not directly introduce factors that influence the credibility of a source, especially its expertise and trustworthiness. In the absence of such an introduction, we found that students frequently based their evaluations on a single facet of trustworthiness: a source’s perspective. Further, students commonly determined a source’s credibility not based on its expertise and trustworthiness but instead through factors like a website’s contents, URL, or popularity. This study suggests that students need more support understanding what makes an online source credible and more practice examining the full range of elements that contribute to a source’s credibility, from credentials and experience to conflicts of interest. Further, teachers need support that helps them plan for and provide this kind of practice.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the teachers and students who collaborated on this project and to four anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data for this study were collected in Fall and Winter 2021, before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the ensuing changes to Twitter’s verification systems. Teacher 2’s description was accurate at the time.

2 Although we see perspective and bias as distinct, we treated these as a single code because it is not clear that teachers or students conceived of them in this way.

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously supported by the University of Maryland College of Education Support Program for Advancing Research and Collaboration (Sarah McGrew, Principal Investigator).