Narratives and Their Impact on Students’ Information Seeking and Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education Economics and Medicine

Mita Banerjee,Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia,Jochen Roeper

doi:10.3389/feduc.2020.570625

Mita Banerjee, Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.570625

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Abstract

The digital and information age has fundamentally transformed the way in which students learn and the study material they have at their disposal, especially in higher education. Students need to possess a number of higher-order cognitive and metacognitive skills, including effective information processing and critical reasoning to be able to navigate the Internet and use online sources, even those found outside of academically curated domains and in the depths of the Internet, and to solve (domain-specific) problems. Linking qualitative and quantitative research and connecting the humanities to empirical educational science studies, this paper investigates the role of narratives and their impact on university students’ information seeking and their critical online reasoning (COR). This study focuses on the link between students’ online navigation skills, information seeking behavior and critical reasoning with regard to the specific domains: economics and medicine. For the empirical analysis in this paper, we draw on a study that assesses the critical online reasoning (COR) skills of undergraduate students of economics and medicine at two German universities. To measure COR skills, we used five tasks from the computer-based assessment “Critical Online Reasoning Assessment” (CORA), which assesses students’ skills in critically evaluating online sources and reasoning using evidence on contentious issues. The conceptual framework of this study is based on an existing methodology – narrative economics and medicine – and discusses its instructional potential and how it can be used to develop a new tool of ’wise interventions’ to enhance students’ COR in higher education. Based on qualitative content analyses of the students’ written responses, i.e. short essays, three distinct patterns of information seeking behavior among students have been identified. These three patterns – “Unambiguous Fact-Checking”, “Perspective-Taking without Fact-Checking”, and “Web Credibility-Evaluating” – differ substantially in their potential connection to underlying narratives of information used by students to solve the CORA tasks. This analysis suggests that training university students in narrative analysis can strongly contribute to enhancing their critical online reasoning.

Highlights

Research BackgroundThe digital and information age has fundamentally transformed the way in which students learn and the study material they have at their disposal, especially in higher education
Based on the data from the Critical Online Reasoning Assessment” (CORA) study, we focus on the research question did the narrative influence how the students perceived and processed the information and how they reasoned based on the online sources they used?
We suggested that if affective influence is key to narratives, this notion can be applied to the interpretation of students’ responses, for instance, how students assess the trustworthiness of expert opinions on topics described in the CORA tasks

Summary

Introduction

Research BackgroundThe digital and information age has fundamentally transformed the way in which students learn and the study material they have at their disposal, especially in higher education. Learners who use the Internet must be able to assess the credibility and trustworthiness of sources and information (McGrew et al, 2018; Wineburg et al, 2018), they have to balance new information against their prior knowledge and any beliefs they may hold (van Strien et al, 2014; List and Alexander, 2017, 2018), and they must recognize how a given text or media format can affect their rational decision-making processes (Stanovich, 2018) and their emotional judgment, which may lead to judgment errors, for instance, due to fast thinking and other biases such as motivated reasoning (Stanovich et al, 2013; Kahne and Bowyer, 2017) This ever-changing information and learning environment has profound consequences for the teaching of domainspecific knowledge in higher education (e.g., Harrison and Luckett, 2019). The dichotomy between knowledge and beliefs can be a particular obstacle to learning with the help of the Internet (Chiu et al, 2013; Hsu et al, 2014; van Strien et al, 2016)

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