https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1884-3252
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ABSTRACT
In this study, we investigate how 2,216 Swedish upper secondary school students’ performances of sourcing, evaluating evidence, and corroborating digital news relate to their background, educational orientation attitudes, and self-rated skills. We used a combined online survey and performance test to investigate students’ abilities to evaluate online news. Findings confirm and challenge previous research results about civic online reasoning. The most prominent effect on performance is the appreciation of credible news. This attitude is related to students’ abilities to source news, evaluate texts and images, and corroborate a misleading climate change website. We also found a digital civic literacy divide between students on theoretical and vocational programs with different knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Noting the democratic challenge of misinformation, we call for more research on how education can support digital civic literacy in general and specific ways.
Acknowledgements
We are truly grateful to all the students accepting to participate in this study as well as their teachers who helped by distributing the survey. We would also like to direct a special thanks to Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd, Ebba Elwin, Fredrik Brounéus, Kerstin Ekholm, Maria Lindberg, and members of the Stanford History Education Group for their valuable input and support in the process.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In this article, we define misinformation as inaccurate, manipulative, or false information, including disinformation, which is deliberately designed to mislead people.
2 See more details about this test item below in the Methods section.
4 SiRiS, National Statistics from Swedish National Agency for Education, https://www.skolverket.se/skolutveckling/statistik/sok-statistik-om-forskola-skola-och-vuxenutbildning [accessed 2019 01 12].
5 Thus, a lateral reading of this site should make students skeptical. Previous items testing skills of corroboration have prompted students to compare two competing sources of information, but not prompting them to use digital resources to double-check information (Nygren & Guath, Citation2019). Noting the importance of using digital resources in lateral reading (Wineburg & McGrew, Citation2019), we chose to replace the test items used in Nygren and Guath (Citation2019) with this item, emphasizing the combination of searching and evaluating information to corroborate claims.
7 The results are not affected by the category that is chosen as baseline. In our case, it was automatically coded as baseline in the software (R) which we used to analyze the data.