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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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Choosing the trustworthy source is not the same as understanding why it is trustworthy.
Adolescents can rank online texts by credibility more easily than they can justify those rankings: 73 Finnish 16-17-year-olds mostly ordered the texts correctly but averaged only about 20 of 48 points on written justifications, and time spent on the task was the best predictor of justification quality.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Choosing the trustworthy source is not the same as understanding why it is trustworthy.
Adolescents can rank online texts by credibility more easily than they can justify those rankings: 73 Finnish 16-17-year-olds mostly ordered the texts correctly but averaged only about 20 of 48 points on written justifications, and time spent on the task was the best predictor of justification quality.
Scope note — small cross-sectional sample from high-performing schools, using fictitious texts
Limits the claim's scope: a different population, assay, or outcome.
Behavioural engagement shows up in the quality of work.
Effort invested in a task tracks the quality of reasoning: among Finnish 16-17-year-olds evaluating online texts, time spent on the task was the only independent predictor of better credibility justifications.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Behavioural engagement shows up in the quality of work.
Effort invested in a task tracks the quality of reasoning: among Finnish 16-17-year-olds evaluating online texts, time spent on the task was the only independent predictor of better credibility justifications.
Scope note — cross-sectional; cannot show that forcing more time would improve reasoning
Limits the claim's scope: a different population, assay, or outcome.
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.
History
When this study was placed
Dated entries from the concept change log — when this paper was added or removed as support, challenge, or qualifier on a claim.
Placed as a scope qualifier on Literacy Instruction
Adolescents can rank online texts by credibility more easily than they can justify those rankings: 73 Finnish 16-17-year-olds mostly ordered the texts correctly but averaged only about 20 of 48 points on written justifications, and time spent on the task was the best predictor of justification quality.
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
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
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.
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.
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