Evidence Summary
Incoming Undergraduate Students Struggle to Accurately Evaluate Legitimacy
of Online News
A Review of:
Evanson, C., & Sponsel, J. (2019). From syndication to misinformation: How
undergraduate students engage with and evaluate digital news. Communications in Information Literacy, 13(2),
228-250. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2019.13.2.6
Reviewed by:
Sarah Bartlett Schroeder
Research & Instruction Librarian
University of Washington Bothell/Cascadia College
Campus Library
Bothell, Washington, United States of America
Email: sarahkb6@uw.edu
Received: 21 Sept. 2020 Accepted: 5 Jan. 2021
2021 Schroeder. This is an Open Access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
DOI: 10.18438/eblip29854
Abstract
Objective – To
determine how new undergraduate students access,
share, and evaluate the credibility of digital news.
Design – Asynchronous
online survey and activity.
Setting – A small
private, liberal arts college in the southeastern United States of America.
Subjects – Participants
included 511 incoming first-year college students.
Methods – Using the
Moodle Learning Management System, incoming first-year students completed a
mandatory questionnaire that included multiple choice, Likert scale,
open-ended, and true/false questions related to news consumption. Two questions
asked students to identify which news sources and social networking sites they
have used recently, and the next two questions asked students to define fake
news and rate the degree to which fake news impacts them personally and the degree
to which it impacts society. The end of the survey presented students with
screenshots of three news stories and asked them to reflect on how they would
evaluate the claim in the story, their confidence level in the claim, and
whether or not they would share this news item on social media. The three items
chosen represent certain situations that commonly cause confusion for news
consumers: (a) a heading that does not match the text of the article, (b) a
syndicated news story, and (c) an impostor URL and fake news story. Researchers
coded the student responses using both preset and
emergent codes.
Main Results – Eighty-two
percent of students reported using at least one social media site to access
political news in the previous seven days. Students reported believing that
fake news is a worrying trend for society, with 86% labelling it either a
“moderate” or “extreme” barrier to society’s ability to recognize accurate
information. However, they expressed less concern about their own ability to
navigate an information environment in which fake news is prevalent, with 51%
agreeing that it has only somewhat of an effect on their own ability to
effectively navigate digital information. Of the three news items presented to
them, students expressed the least confidence (an average of 1.55/4) and least
interest in sharing (12%) the first news item, in which the heading does not
match the text. However, only 14% of respondents noted this mismatch. In
evaluations of the second item, an AP news item on the Breitbart website, 35%
of students noted the website on which the article was found, but fewer noted
that the original source is the Associated Press. Student responses to the
third article, a fake news item from a website masquerading as an NBC website,
show that 37% of students believed the source to come from a legitimate NBC
source. Only 7% of students recognized the unusual URL, and 24% of respondents
indicated that they might share this news item on social media.
Conclusion – The study finds
that impostor URLs and syndicated news items might confuse students into
misevaluating the information before them, and that librarians and other
instructors should raise awareness of these tactics.
Commentary
Project
Information Literacy took on the subject of fake news in 2018. In a large scale
survey across 11 U.S. colleges, they found that social networking sites were a
prominent source of news for college students, and that 45% of respondents
lacked confidence in distinguishing fake news from real news (Head et al.,
2019). Some smaller scale studies have sought to determine how effective
undergraduate students are at distinguishing fake news from real news. For
example, in one study of 63 students, researchers found that students were able
to correctly identify whether a news item was real or fake approximately 62% of
the time (Leeder, 2019). Researchers have also looked into how and where
students get their news (Zakharov et al., 2019).
This
review analyzes the design and data analysis of this study using a checklist
evaluation from the Center for Evidence Based Management. The authors present a
broad research question, seeking to explore how incoming college students
engage with news in an online environment. The questions they asked students
are appropriate for this line of inquiry, but the topic remains too large to
cover adequately with a single study. Nearly the entire incoming class
completed the mandatory questionnaire, which provides an excellent opportunity
to study the information behaviours of their student body, though they do not
share details of their student demographics. Because students’ backgrounds may
impact way they engage with news, this information would be useful for
practitioners in other geographic areas.
The
article is sparse on details about the authors’ coding processes. They provide
a list of codes in the appendix and state that some codes were preset and others were emergent codes that came about
during their coding process. It is not known whether the authors coded
individually and later pooled their work or coded together. More information on
the coding process would help others replicate such a study more easily. Those seeking to conduct a similar study could also benefit
from reflections on the process of choosing sample articles. The authors do not
explain whether they sought potentially controversial articles or not, but
students may have stronger reactions to hot-button topics than more benign
ones, which could impact their evaluations.
The
authors note several times that one significant weakness of their study was an
inability to share actual links with students rather than screenshots of news
items. This prevented students from engaging with the news item in its entirety
(i.e., they could not follow links or fact-check information in other sources),
meaning they were evaluating news stories in a manner that is possibly
inconsistent with how they would evaluate such news items if they encountered
them on their own. Observations in a more natural online news environment may
yield different results.
The
data here provides evidence to support adding information about news
syndication and imposter URLs in news evaluation instruction, as these present
points of confusion for some students. However, as the authors note, online
news systems evolve quickly. It may be beneficial to repeat this study over
multiple years to track how student abilities change over time.
References
Center for Evidence-Based Management. (n.d). Critical Appraisal
of a Survey. Retrieved from https://www.cebma.org/wp-content/uploads/Critical-Appraisal-Questions-for-a-Survey.pdf
Head,
A., DeFrain, E., Fister,
B., & MacMillan, M. (2019). Across the great divide: How today's college
students engage with news. First Monday,
24(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.10166
Leeder,
C. (2019). How college students evaluate and share “fake news” stories. Library & Information Science Research,
41(3), 100967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2019.100967
Zakharov, W.,
Li, H., & Fosmire, M. (2019). Undergraduates’
news consumption and perceptions of fake news in science. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 19(4), 653-665. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0040