Learning to evaluate sources of science (mis)information : a mixed methods study of high school students' scientific online reasoning
Keywords: Education.

In an increasingly digital world, young people turn to the internet for information about a range of socioscientific issues, like COVID-19 variants and climate change. However, misinformation spreads easily over the internet and students can find it difficult to evaluate false or misleading information online (Breakstone et al., 2021; Vosoughi et al., 2018). Determining the credibility of scientific information poses a particular challenge for students because they need to know if that information has been vetted by social and institutional processes commonly used to produce reliable knowledge in science, like peer review by relevant experts (Osborne et al., 2022). Drawing on ideas from science media literacy and civic online reasoning frameworks (Höttecke & Allchin, 2020; Wineburg et al., 2022), this study proposes the concept of scientific online reasoning, or the specific capacity to evaluate the credibility of scientific claims on the internet. This research then examines how high school students perform on scientific online reasoning tasks, which assess their ability to evaluate the credibility of sources of scientific (mis)information online. In collaboration with a high school biology teacher, I co-designed an intervention consisting of a series of 11 instructional activities about evaluating sources of scientific information on the internet. These activities were implemented in three ninth grade biology classes. Using a mixed methods approach, I examined how students applied ideas from the activities by analyzing their performance on pre/post assessments (n = 43) and pre/post cognitive think-aloud tasks (n = 6). All of the tasks were designed to assess students' abilities to evaluate online sources of science information (of varying quality and credibility) using three criteria derived from the literature: 1) conflicts of interest, 2) relevant expertise, and 3) alignment with scientific consensus and three online reasoning strategies: lateral reading, click restraint, and wise use of Wikipedia. On their written assessments, students' scores improved significantly on all three tasks: evaluating conflicts of interest, relevant expertise, and alignment with scientific consensus. On their think-aloud tasks, only one of the six students was able to correctly identify an unreliable source on the pre-intervention task compared to five of the six students on the post-intervention task. Across the written assessments and think-aloud tasks, students demonstrated an increased use of online reasoning strategies to evaluate sources after participating in the intervention. These results demonstrate that teaching ideas about criteria related to the social processes of science, along with online reasoning strategies, can help students evaluate sources of scientific information, misinformation, and disinformation encountered on the internet. Findings from this project will extend current literature focused on science media literacy by providing empirical evidence that suggests students develop nuanced understandings about evaluating science when science media literacy and scientific online reasoning are explicitly incorporated into the science curriculum