Online Information Landscape
In CORE, we systematically investigate the online information landscape (IL), which includes all sources and content accessible on the World Wide Web that students use for their university studies as well as for solving COR tasks in online assessments. An unrestricted Internet search on a domain-specific or generic topic is recorded in real-time to gather data on how an Internet search is carried out. Data is also collected on which Web sources are accessed during the search, such as domain, modality, genre, quality, as well as other characteristics. Such characteristics could have a decisive influence on the use of online information, however the online IL has rarely been examined for educational purposes.
To address this research desideratum, the IL framework in CORE is based on the integration of several theories to analyze the central characteristics of online sources. This includes the analyses of
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the correctness and comprehensibility of content based on the evaluation criteria of established theories, such as media bias (see project B04);
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linguistic features of the sources based on the theories of text and cognitive linguistics (see projectB05);
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narrative framings and latent meaning structures based on theories of narratology and reconstructive hermeneutics (see project B06).
Critical Online Reasoning
Students need to apply specific skills in order to acquire applicable knowledge of the online IL. CORE research is based on a newly developed, integrated theoretical-conceptual framework for modelling and assessing these skills:critical online reasoning (COR)
COR consists of three overarching and overlapping cognitive facets:
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(1) online information acquisition (OIA) skills, e.g., selecting search engines or databases, specifying search queries; (2) critical information evaluation (CIE) skills, e.g., evaluating website credibility based on cues; (3) synthesis of information accessed (REAS), including accounting for common errors and biases and considering and weighting (contradictory) arguments and (covert) perspectives of (partly conflicting) information sources. |
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Metacognitive skills (MCA) regulate the state- and situation-specific activation, continuation, and conclusion of COR processes within the encompassing information acquisition context, e.g., recognizing the need to use COR in learning contexts e.g. to solve information problems.
The COR concept leans heavily on process and phase models of (online) information search, selection, and evaluation, especially the Information problem-solving on the Internet (IPS-I) model (Brand-Gruwel et al., 2009), and it includes insights e.g., into cues of sources from related research on ‘Web credibility’ (e.g., Wierzbicki, 2018) and multiple-source comprehension (MSU, Braasch et al., 2018).
Based on a research review (Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Hartig et al., 2021), we also developed a taxonomy for online student learning, created with a focus on knowledge acquisition from Internet sources. The taxonomy describes the typical situations in which students use the Internet:
(1) internet use in specific study and practice-related tasks within one study domain, such as creating a diagnostic plan in medicine.
(2) the cross-domain area, which covers broad topics such as discussion forums on climate change.
Therefore, CORE distinguishes between two typical application contexts of COR:
- Everyday situations in the study without reference to a specific domain
- as well as domain-specific situations.
Since students face domain-specific as well as cross-domain requirements in their studies, CORE focuses on both contexts. In the generic context (e.g. in relation to daily life) COR will be referred to as GEN-COR and DOM-COR in the domain-specific context. To examine both application contexts, students were presented with corresponding tasks based on real Internet or Internet-like simulations.