Establishing Trustworthiness when Students Read Multiple Documents Containing Conflicting Scientific Evidence

Abstract

Students read six documents that varied in terms of their perspectives on a scientific issue and the trustworthiness of the source features. After reading, students wrote essays, rank-ordered the documents according to perceived trustworthiness, and provided reasons for their rank-order decisions. Students put the most trust in a textbook and a public information text, primarily giving content reasons for their trustworthiness judgments. The kind of source characteristics that students drew upon when deciding what to trust and what not to trust varied across documents. Finally, their source evaluation was related to the source citations included in their essays.

Notes

The sample of students in the current work also contributed to data reported by Bråten, Ferguson, Strømsø, and Anmarkrud (2014) and by Ferguson, Bråten, and Strømsø (2012). However, the data and analyses incuded in this article are unique to this study.

²The think-aloud comments fall outside the scope of the current work. Please see Bråten et al. (2014) and Ferguson et al. (2012) for results that focus on the think-aloud data.

The total number of reasons (395) displayed in Table 5 does not equal the total number of reasons displayed in Table 4 (420). In 25 instances, participants provided some reasons that were not tied to any particular document. The statement “some of the texts had more theory than illustrations of the fact that radiation can lead to cancer” exemplifies a general content reason.