Reading
How do teens judge if online health articles are trustworthy?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
High school students can easily identify which online health texts are untrustworthy, but they struggle to explain the reasons behind their judgments.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Adolescents may identify untrustworthy online texts more easily than they can justify credibility judgments in writing.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Seventy-three Finnish 16–17-year-olds ranked four fictitious sugar-health texts by credibility more easily than they justified those ranks: mean justification score 20.21 out of 48. Time on task was the best predictor of justification quality. Ranking success with weak justifications is a mismatch of outcome sizes, not a classroom engagement d.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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