Beyond knowledge: Examining digital literacy's role in the acquisition of understanding in science

Abstract

Today's students must learn to be critical consumers of the digital learning technologies that are rapidly populating their world. Digital literacy is not an innate skill, and comprises more than facility using the Internet, word processing programs, or social media. Likewise, literacy itself has been redefined as the acquisition of not just knowledge, but also understanding including reasons and evidence for knowing. We wished to build upon Greene et al.'s (2014) research on the role of digital literacy when acquiring knowledge by conducting a similar study with a learning task focused on acquiring understanding. Using a similar single-group pretest-posttest correlational design with a larger sample of 53 college students but a different learning task focused on understanding, we found evidence of significant differences in digital literacy processing. In this study, participants engaged in more planning, monitoring, and epistemic cognition processing than participants in the previous study. Our findings have important implications for studying and promoting digital literacy, while also illustrating the importance of investing in resource-intensive work on differences in digital literacy processing across a variety of domains, contexts, and educational goals.