This article builds off prior work on news consumption habits and perception of bias in the news by focusing on college students' self-generated definitions of bias, and the strategies they employ to guard against how their personal bias potentially affects what news they choose to believe and consume. Through interviews with undergraduate…

How do students make sense of sources encountered during online inquiry, when the source types can be as varied as the topics themselves? This paper presents findings from a multiple-case study exploring how four 8th grade students evaluated source credibility while engaged in independent research during an inquiry-based information literacy…

The current study examined the extent to which sixth grade students used their pre-existing topic beliefs to guide comprehension of semantic ideas within multiple conflicting texts, and the sources providing them. Adolescents completed an inventory assessing their pre-reading topic beliefs one week prior to the study. During the study, students…

Today's college students grew up with digital news media and social media readily available on their smartphones. As a result, students are likely to use their smartphones to access the news through social media where partisan misinformation is easily spread. Efforts to combat the spread of misinformation on social media are being explored on…

In a knowledge society characterized by an abundance of information sources that present conflicting perspectives on socio-scientific controversies, it is extremely important for readers to construct effective mental models of such controversies. Nevertheless, readers' mental representations of controversial information are assumed to be biased…

This mixed-methods study explores how the use of satirical news videos contributes to student engagement with information literacy (IL) instruction. The sample was drawn from first-year undergraduate students in for-credit IL courses. Overall, the use of satirical news videos improved student engagement with, and enjoyment of, IL topics. Given the…

A vast amount of information is now available online, produced by a variety of sources with a range of editorial oversight procedures. These range from very centralized information with multiple layers of review, to no oversight at all. Determining which information is credible can pose a real challenge. An experiment was designed to determine…

The major interest of this study was to examine the interaction between selected ethnic cues in the aural and visual channels and the effect they have on student perception of an information source. Some 186 sixth grade students were divided equally along black and white racial lines into two groups and shown a filmstrip on drug abuse. Three…