Effectively learning to evaluate sources, especially when conducting online research, is an essential skill for middle-grade students. This article argues that supporting students in learning to evaluate sources must involve using critical consciousness skills to do so, or the evaluation is incomplete. In the article, the authors expand the…

In this research study two professors and a classroom teacher collaborated to develop instructional moves to teach lateral reading, a digital source evaluation technique that involves conducting strategic quick research on sources of information. Results indicated that the introduction of lateral reading made students aware of the need to know…

People of all ages have difficulty interpreting the information they read online. The contemporary media environment grants the public access to an unprecedented amount of information, and virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a better understanding of that technology and students' utilization of such tools. It is widely…

Bilingual adolescents actively participate in literacy practices on the multilingual Internet. However, research has paid little attention to these readers' use of their linguistic knowledge and skills as they choose and learn from multilingual resources on the Internet. With think-aloud protocols, this study examined how Korean-English bilingual…

Studies showed that middle school students misuse the Internet sources for reading and writing purposes though they are skillful at online personal communication. Eventually, this led to the emergence of copy-paste trends in students' written work. In this paper, we aimed at exploring 8th grade teachers' and students' perceptions about the factors…

This case study applied sociocultural theory to examine the climate change ideas communicated by one group of middle school students (N = 39) in a suburban community on the U.S. East Coast. We investigated the ways in which students' participation in the sociocultural activities of their varied communities appeared to inform their understandings…

This dissertation focuses on the perceptions that young people have of federal government websites and of the U.S. government, as well as exploring possible connections between the perceptions of government and government websites. Not only is this a virtually unstudied area of e-government and youth information behavior, but it is also of…

The present investigation examined middle school students' evaluations of the usefulness for addressing a social studies inquiry question of a variety of sources of information, and the basis of these judgments. This task situation simulates an early phase of information gathering and selection in the context of inquiry. For each of nine sources,…

As online research has become an increasingly standard activity for middle school and high school students, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has simultaneously emerged as the bane of many teachers who include research-focused assignments in their courses. An online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit its entries, Wikipedia has educators…