Abstract
Critical evaluation skills when using online information are considered important in many research and education frameworks; critical thinking and information literacy are cited as key twenty-first century skills for students. Higher education may play a special role in promoting students' skills in critically evaluating (online) sources. Today, higher education students are more likely to use the Internet instead of offline sources such as textbooks when studying for exams. However, far from being a value-neutral, curated learning environment, the Internet poses various challenges, including a large amount of incomplete, contradictory, erroneous, and biased information. With low barriers to online publication, the responsibility to access, select, process, and use suitable relevant and trustworthy information rests with the (self-directed) learner. Despite the central importance of critically evaluating online information, its assessment in higher education is still an emerging field. In this paper, we present a newly developed theoretical-conceptual framework for Critical Online Reasoning (COR), situated in relation to prior approaches (“information problem-solving,” “multiple-source comprehension,” “web credibility,” “informal argumentation,” “critical thinking”), along with an evidence-centered assessment framework and its preliminary validation. In 2016, the Stanford History Education Group developed and validated the assessment ofCivic Online Reasoningfor the United States. At the college level, this assessment holistically measures students' web searches and evaluation of online information using open Internet searches and real websites. Our initial adaptation and validation indicated a need to further develop the construct and assessment framework for evaluating higher education students in Germany across disciplines over their course of studies. Based on our literature review and prior analyses, we classified COR abilities into three uniquely combined facets: (i) online information acquisition, (ii) critical information evaluation, and (iii) reasoning based on evidence, argumentation, and synthesis. We modeled COR ability from a behavior, content, process, and development perspective, specifying scoring rubrics in an evidence-centered design. Preliminary validation results from expert interviews and content analysis indicated that the assessment covers typical online media and challenges for higher education students in Germany and contains cues to tap modeled COR abilities. We close with a discussion of ongoing research and potentials for future development.
Highlights
Relevance and Research BackgroundToday, higher education students use the Internet to access information and sources for learning much more frequently than offline sources such as textbooks (Gasser et al, 2012; Maurer et al, 2020)
The preliminary validity evidence from content analysis and expert interviews indicated some important implications for the CORA
the expert interviews indicated that it taps higher education students' abilities to search
Summary
Relevance and Research BackgroundToday, higher education students use the Internet to access information and sources for learning much more frequently than offline sources such as textbooks (Gasser et al, 2012; Maurer et al, 2020). There have been warnings about the harmful effects of online media use on students’ learning (Maurer et al, 2018), with misinformation and the acquisition of (domain-specific) misconceptions and erroneous knowledge being prominent examples (Bayer et al, 2019; Center for Humane Technology, 2019). Positive affordances for collaboration, organization, aggregation, presentation, and the ubiquitous accessibility of information have been discussed in research on online and multimedia learning (Mayer, 2009). Problems such as addictive gratification mechanisms, filter bubbles and algorithm-amplified polarization, political and commercial targeting based on online behavior profiles, censorship, and misinformation (Bayer et al, 2019; Center for Humane Technology, 2019) have recently been critically discussed as well. The potential of online applications and social media for purposes of persuasion has been known for some time (Fogg, 2003), though the impact of online information on knowledge acquisition is still under-researched to date
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