How do teens judge if online health articles are trustworthy?
High school students can easily identify which online health texts are untrustworthy, but they struggle to explain the reasons behind their judgments.
Source
Adolescents' credibility justifications when evaluating online texts
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Upper-secondary students justifying credibility of online texts
- N
- N=73 · Ages 16–17 from two Finnish city schools
- Population
- Finnish upper-secondary students
- Outcome
- Justifications adolescents use when evaluating the credibility of online texts
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How do teens judge if online health articles are trustworthy?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
73 upper secondary school students participated
Participants were 73 upper secondary school students, aged 16 to 17 years from two schools located in two major cities in Finland.
four online texts about sugar
In completing the task, students read four online texts about the effects of sugar consumption.
What they did
Researchers tested 73 Finnish high school students, aged 16 to 17, using a digital tool to assess how they evaluate online information. The students read four short, fictitious articles about the health effects of sugar that varied in credibility, such as a blog post by a mother and an article by a memory researcher. The researchers measured students' prior knowledge of sugar, their online thinking styles, and the time they spent completing the task, while also collecting their written explanations for why each source was or was not believable.
What they found
While most students easily ranked the highly credible sources above the biased or unscientific ones, their written explanations for these choices were generally weak, scoring an average of only 20.21 out of 48 points. Many participants provided vague justifications or confused different aspects of credibility, such as evaluating a writer's knowledge based purely on the text's design rather than the author's credentials. The single best predictor of high-quality justifications was the time spent on the task, showing that students who invested more effort performed significantly better.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study's findings are limited by a small sample of 73 students recruited from high-performing schools in Finland, meaning these results may not represent adolescents with lower academic achievement or from different cultural backgrounds. Because the reading materials were fictitious, the experiment cannot show how students would evaluate authentic, familiar websites where they might rely on prior brand reputation. Additionally, because the data are correlational, the study cannot prove that simply forcing students to spend more time on a task will causally improve their critical thinking skills.
Key terms
- epistemic beliefs
- Beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how people obtain it.
- behavioral engagement
- The amount of physical effort, attention, and time a student invests in completing an academic task.
- source credibility
- The perceived trustworthiness and expertise of an information source.
- benevolence
- The degree to which an author is perceived as well-intentioned and committed to sharing accurate information rather than seeking personal gain.
- heuristic processing
- A fast, automatic way of thinking that relies on simple mental shortcuts and superficial cues rather than deep analysis.
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Quiz yourself
What four aspects of credibility did this study investigate regarding adolescents' evaluation of online texts?
Common questions
Did students recognize that the candy company CEO was biased?
Most did, but 13.7% of the students still rated the CEO's commitment to sharing accurate information as high, failing to recognize the clear commercial conflict of interest.
Why did students struggle to explain why they trusted a journalist?
Many students showed a naive understanding of journalism, often assuming journalists have no expertise of their own and only parrot what sources say, while ignoring professional verification standards.
What was the strongest predictor of a student's ability to justify their credibility choices?
The amount of time spent on the task (behavioral engagement) was the only significant independent predictor in the final analysis, meaning students who took their time wrote much better justifications.
How was the quality of students' explanations evaluated?
Researchers scored each of the 16 written justifications on a scale from 0 to 3, rewarding points based on relevance to the specific prompt and the depth or complexity of the reasoning.
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