Scaffolding Students’ Information Literacy Skills with an Online Credibility Evaluation Learning Tool.

Abstract

This research explored how to effectively teach today’s students Information Literacy (IL) and credibility evaluation skills in the online information environment. In light of students’ reliance on the Internet, their general lack of IL skills, limited critical evaluation practices, and the lack of consistent institutional IL training, new pedagogical methods are needed to teach effective online IL skills. Specifically, there is a need for IL training that is customized to the online information environment and relevant to the research habits of today’s students. To address this problem, an online learning tool incorporating scaffolding and metacognitive support was prototyped and built. The tool decomposes credibility evaluation into a structured set of stages, giving students repeated practice in each stage while providing scaffolded support for learning and metacognitive reflection, and integrating the instruction into the online information environment. An experimental study was conducted to test the tool's effectiveness, with a total of 84 students randomly assigned to three experimental conditions to allow for statistically valid analysis of the results. The findings show that use of the online credibility evaluation tool significantly increased subjects' understanding of credibility criteria. The results did not show a significant difference between groups in the application of evidence-based source characteristics as the basis for their credibility evaluations, or in metacognitive awareness of the evaluation process, although descriptive trends suggest some improvement in the treatment group. Along with these three research questions, the study also examined the types of sources that students used in their research, showing that they relied on blogs and other hybrid online genres that do not conform to the traditional genres often covered by IL instruction. The study also solicited self-reports of student learning, with students reporting that they learned that online credibility evaluation is more complex than they thought, involving asking systematic questions and using critical thinking. Overall, this research demonstrates that IL instruction needs to address the specific challenges of online credibility evaluation, and that scaffolding and metacognitive support in the form of an online learning tool can effectively integrate IL instruction into the online information environment where students actually do their research.