Chapter 7: Summary, conclusion, and recommendations
3.5 Information behaviour of learners
3.5.2 Evaluation of Internet information sources by learners
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were not aware that they have misspelled a term, had their results limited and potentially irrelevant (Dempsey and Valenti, 2016:203).
In order for learners to effectively search and retrieve information from the Internet or other electronic sources, the learner or information seeker is supposed to have sufficient knowledge and competence to retrieve the desired piece of information from the electronic resources available (Singh and Mahapatra, 2016:477). According to Sales, Pinto and Fernández-Ramos (2016:4), dealing with these requirements or competencies successfully requires the learner to acquire the following:
• a set of core skills related to knowledge of the terminology of the subject matter;
• a sufficient command of suitable search strategies;
• the ability to access automated catalogues, databases and electronic sources of information;
• a command of strategies for searching for information on the Internet; and
• the ability to use informal sources of electronic information.
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and Fernández-Ramos, 2016:5). However, it has been found that, “information evaluation is knowledge and skills taken for granted or inappropriately addressed” in many high school programmes (Kim and Hannafin, 2016:385).
The Internet has inundated us with vast information “much of it unvetted” and given the amount of information available on the Internet on each field of study, it has become increasingly difficult for learners to assess the authenticity and reliability of the information they retrieved from the Internet (Damico and Panos, 2016:275; Gauducheau, 2016:44).According toDamico and Baildon (2015:61), Internet information sources:
can be complex in several ways: provenance or authorship and sponsorship are sometimes difficult to discern; the purposes of sources can be vague or be intended to deceive; the structure, language features and knowledge demands of sources can make it challenging to evaluate the content’s accuracy; and it is often relatively easy to corroborate the view of one source by locating another source with the same perspective, argument or set of facts.
Similarly, the large amount of information on the Internet does not make it easy for learners to find “pragmatically appropriate resources”, since a number of potentially useful information resources are often not found by them (Moskina, 2013:1). The situation is so because the analyses of people’s attitude towards information retrieval and processing starts with understanding how the information to be processed is chosen and evaluated (Özmen, 2015:780). Nevertheless, assessment of the quality of the information sources by learners have been found to be problematic, since many “young individuals tend to have a rather vague idea of the criteria on which information seeking should be based” (Gauducheau, 2016:44).
Learners’ inability to critically evaluate source characteristics of documents retrieved from the Internet potentially leads to comprehension and learning detriment as a result of “information overload and an inappropriate usage of questionable sources” (Braasch et al., 2013:180). Although, learners may readily filter key sources of information from the Internet, they sometimes, “ignore ways in which those sources might be incoherent or incomplete” (Kim and Hannafin, 2016:384).
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Information provided by an Internet source may have its own limitations. It is therefore important to look for reliable online information sources when accessing the Internet and these reliable sources are those we trust the author, creator, or sponsor of the online information to have done due diligence to ensure that the information presented and the claims made “are accurate, reasonable, and substantiated with quality evidence” (Damico and Panos, 2016:275; Paglieri et al., 2014:176). It is important to note that assessment and evaluation of Internet information sources’
reliability is not an end in itself but it is viewed and understood best in most cases as part of an
“analytical process that emphasises the extraction of useful, relevant evidence to answer questions”
(Damico and Baildon, 2015:61).
The idea of learners accessing online information regularly on the Internet at this current information age requires them to contend with the credibility of vast information available to us.
Reliability and credibility are companion concepts which are often used interchangeably to imply trustworthiness; however, “discerning the trustworthiness of information”, is not a straight forward task (Damico and Baildon, 2015:51-52). Since the trustworthiness of online information cannot be overlooked, it is important for learners to evaluate the quality of the resources obtained from the Internet based on source attributes once they obtain the information resources they consider potentially relevant from the Internet (Sales, Pinto and Fernández-Ramo, 2016:5).
In order not to overlook the trustworthiness of online information, it is important for learners to apply the “sourcing heuristic” which is “looking first [at] the source of the document before reading the body of the text” (Wineburg, 1991:77). However, there are established linkages between high school learners’ “discrimination of document reliability based on source attributes”
such as author, date and type of publication (Braasch et al., 2013:180). An advantage of evaluating and observing the quality of online information is that, it helps in feeding back the assessment of the information source with such feedback intelligently distributing “among different features of the source—e.g., competence and sincerity” (Paglieri et al., 2014:176).
Internet information sources present particular challenges for learners since they struggle to garner a larger conceptual understanding of reliability and “often use superficial or irrelevant criteria to evaluate sources (Damico and Baildon, 2015:52). Lack of source evaluation has been observed as
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a reason that lead poorer learners to be relatively inattentive to source information; and studies have found that, it compels learners to spend considerable time accessing and reading information from documents that are not reliable, making them develop less accurate understanding of the information they require from the Internet to satisfy their information need (Malliari et al., 2014;
Braasch et al., 2013; Taylor, 2012).
In addition to an escalating array of Internet information sources to “grapple with, the topics or issues that these sources are tied” to can also be very complex making it difficult for learners to evaluate such sources (Damico and Panos, 2016:275). It is therefore not surprising that, many high school learners who have not received training on evaluation of online sources rarely “attend to source features in order to evaluate for reliability” (Braasch et al., 2013:181). This implies that, acquisition of information competence for evaluation training is a series of skills. According to Sales, Pinto and Fernández-Ramos (2016:5), the evaluation training should focus on the acquisition of skills such as the:
• knowing how to assess the quality of resources;
• recognising the author’s ideas;
• familiarity with the types of information sources;
• recognising how up-to date the sources are; and
• knowing the most significant information.
Alexander and Tate (1999) asserted that information users should focus on the following five criteria: accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage when evaluating information sources. Clearly, Information Literacy instruction equips learners to acquire these competences in judging the authenticity and reliability of Internet information sources; since it helps learners “to look for those sources of information which have an established authority” and other criteria (Singh and Mahapatra, 2016:479). Similarly, it equips learners to emphasise and verify source attribution such as identifying the author of an information source, the motivation of the author, how the source came into being as well as the audience that the information was intended for (Damico and Baildon, 2015:51-52). A quality Information Literacy programme for learners should therefore include source evaluation aspects of teaching learners:
• how to identify good sources;
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• how to recognise and interpret the idea held by the author of a text;
• how to distinguish the relevant authors and institutions in their thematic area; and
• how to organise learning according to learners’ level of previous knowledge and the time they have available (Sales, Pinto and Fernández-Ramos, 2016:4-5).