Abstract

This study investigated upper secondary school students’ skills in evaluating the credibility and argumentative content of a blog text and a YouTube video. Both sources concerned child vaccination, the blog text opposing and the YouTube video supporting it. Students rated each source as credible, fairly credible or non-credible, justified their ratings, and analyzed the argumentation of both sources. Their justifications were analyzed for trustworthiness and expertise and their argument analyses for identification of the main position of the source and the reasons supporting it. Students’ justification skills proved fairly weak, and they also struggled with recognizing unbalanced argumentation. Students’ skill in analyzing the argumentation used in the sources also proved inadequate, especially in the blog text task. Overall academic achievement significantly predicted students’ credibility evaluation and argument analysis skills. The results suggest that greater emphasis should be placed on tasks involving the interpretation and analysis of online information.

摘要

本研究调查了高中生在评估博客文本和 YouTube 视频的可信度和辩论内容方面的技能。两个消息来源都涉及儿童疫苗接种、反对的博客文字和支持它的 YouTube 视频。学生将每个来源评为可信、相当可信或不可信，证明他们的评级是合理的，并分析了两个来源的论证。他们对可信度和专业知识的理由进行了分析，并对其论证进行了分析，以确定来源的主要立场及其支持理由。事实证明，学生的论证能力相当薄弱，而且他们还难以识别不平衡的论证。学生在分析来源中使用的论证方面的技能也被证明是不够的，尤其是在博客文本任务中。整体学业成绩显着预测了学生的可信度评估和论证分析能力。结果表明，应更加重视涉及在线信息的解释和分析的任务。