Key Issues in Research on Students’ Critical Reading and Learning in the 21st Century Information Society

Abstract

In the twenty-first-century information society, student readers can draw on a wealth of resources available through a variety of print and digital technologies when seeking well-grounded answers to crucial socio-scientific issues. However, this requires that students integrate information from source materials expressing diverse and even contradictory viewpoints, with the credibility of those sources often a key issue. In this chapter, we argue that one path to improving students’ critical reading and learning is through developing their source evaluation skills, that is, their ability to judge the credibility or trustworthiness of sources by attending to available or accessible information about the source, such as who authored it or what kind of source it is. After discussing pertinent theoretical frameworks, we review several related strands of research concerning students’ source evaluation skills and suggest directions for future research on how individual and textual factors, separately and in concert, may contribute to students’ source evaluation practices, on how judgments of source credibility are related to judgments of content relevance, and on how effective and efficient instruction targeting source evaluation skills can be designed and evaluated.