Web Literacy for Evaluating Credibility of Web Information: Issues and Considerations

Because of a variety of procedures related to design and presentation of web content and structure, there would be a pressing need to consider issues of quality of web information in upcoming years. It is argued, in the current paper, that evaluation issues related to credibility and quality assessments are of high importance in web environment in comparison with traditional information environments. Some evaluation skills like authority, coverage, currency, objectivity, accuracy, critical thinking and information literacy all of which could be categorized as Web Literacy would be fruitful in doing so. There exists, however, lack of evaluation skills among users caused by their cognitive styles, prior knowledge, information skills and of web resources characteristics as well. Some other solutions like dialectical reading, information ethics and also institutional policymaking will also be taken into account at the end of the paper

Web Literacy for Evaluating Credibility of Web Information: Issues and Considerations

Because of a variety of procedures related to design and presentation of web content and structure, there would be a pressing need to consider issues of quality of web information in upcoming years. It is argued, in the current paper, that evaluation issues related to credibility and quality assessments are of high importance in web environment in comparison with traditional information environments. Some evaluation skills like authority, coverage, currency, objectivity, accuracy, critical thinking and information literacy all of which could be categorized as Web Literacy would be fruitful in doing so. There exists, however, lack of evaluation skills among users caused by their cognitive styles, prior knowledge, information skills and of web resources characteristics as well. Some other solutions like dialectical reading, information ethics and also institutional policymaking will also be taken into account at the end of the paper

Personality and Credibility Evaluation: Online Health Information from the Viewpoint of Expert Users

Regarding the high importance of credibility evaluation of health information online in every day and career life, the current research aimed to explore how expert users including students and faculty members evaluate health information on the web especially with regard to their personality trait of conscientiousness. By considering the extensive body of literature and research methodologies, a random sample including 148 students and faculty members located at the two faculties of Medicine Sciences and Nursing and Midwife at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences was the population of the study. Two validated questionnaires related to credibility and conscientiousness was distributed among the participants. Gathered data were then analyzed by SPSS software. Data analysis showed that there existed some problems in evaluating the credibility of online health information and quick retrieval. About half of the participants evaluate web health information as credible often and very often. Most important quality assessment criteria were objectivity, currency, and authority. There was a significant correlation between conscientiousness and credibility assessment of the students and faculty members. There appears a change in trust to information found accord with the change in conscientiousness levels. There was no significant correlation between conscientiousness and trust to information among ill people. Quality and credibility were identified as most important problems in assessing health information on the web. There is a significant and meaningful correlation between conscientiousness and trust or mistrust to health information available via the Web

Personality and Credibility Evaluation: Online Health Information from the Viewpoint of Expert Users

Regarding the high importance of credibility evaluation of health information online in every day and career life, the current research aimed to explore how expert users including students and faculty members evaluate health information on the web especially with regard to their personality trait of conscientiousness. By considering the extensive body of literature and research methodologies, a random sample including 148 students and faculty members located at the two faculties of Medicine Sciences and Nursing and Midwife at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences was the population of the study. Two validated questionnaires related to credibility and conscientiousness was distributed among the participants. Gathered data were then analyzed by SPSS software. Data analysis showed that there existed some problems in evaluating the credibility of online health information and quick retrieval. About half of the participants evaluate web health information as credible often and very often. Most important quality assessment criteria were objectivity, currency, and authority. There was a significant correlation between conscientiousness and credibility assessment of the students and faculty members. There appears a change in trust to information found accord with the change in conscientiousness levels. There was no significant correlation between conscientiousness and trust to information among ill people. Quality and credibility were identified as most important problems in assessing health information on the web. There is a significant and meaningful correlation between conscientiousness and trust or mistrust to health information available via the Web

Review or the Reviewer? Effects of Self-Congruity in Processing Online Travel Review

The self-congruity theory has often been applied in the tourism industry. Yet, it has not been used to examine consumers’ travel information processing. This study aims to explore the effects of self-congruity on consumers’ online travel review processing by integrating it with the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Results collected from a web-based survey in Singapore illustrated that self-congruity contributed significantly as a predictor of argument quality and source credibility. Particularly, reviewer-self-congruity having a strong effect on source credibility of online travel reviews. This study elucidates that Singaporean consumers are inclined to take a two-step information elaboration process: first forming self-congruence with a reviewer to achieve clearance via source credibility, before evaluating the review as useful after scrutinizing based on argument quality. This study suggests Online Travel Agents (OTAs) to provide more reviewer information or leverage on expert sources to increase confidence within consumers for positive online travel review processing

Millennial assessment of credibility among news sources

With so many types of news sources available on the Web, this study sought to examine where those in the millennial generation are turning for credible news and how they are assessing the credibility of that news. A total of 207 participants were asked to use the Web as they would naturally to find news information about a given topic. They were asked to print out a source that they deemed credible, and then complete a questionnaire about their news source and their news consuming habits. The majority of participants turned to the websites of traditional news media sources for information. When evaluating the credibility of their source, participants valued from most to least: type of source, organization of the information, type of information, depth of information, reputation, and presentation. No correlations were found between credibility scores and the frequency of news consumption

Web literacy practices of teacher education students and in-service teachers in Greece : a comparative study

In the expanding context of new literacies and multiliteracies, the abilities to know how to locate, to evaluate and to exploit Web information resources in order to construct knowledge, are acknowledged as extremely important worldwide. Current literacy curricula should encourage the development of such abilities, and  their successful implementation requires teachers themselves to be properly prepared. The present study reports the web searching and evaluating practices for educational purposes employed by both pre-service and in-service teachers. Data was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire. The comparative study  exhibis teachers' web practices with the purpose of identifying aspects of web literacy that require attention when designing and implementing relevant educational initiatives. According to the research findings, both pre-service and in-service teachers are based almost exclusively on popular search engines to locate web information resources, and they choose such resources without examining their wider context. In order to evaluate web information resources, they consider mainly morphological and design elements, rather than content features such as their origin and credibility. The findings raise the potential of applying critical literacy principles on the Web so that teachers can approach it critiquely.[1] when using its resources in educational settings. [1] learn to think “critiquely” (a word coined by James Paul Gee), that is, not merely consume information but also “understand and critique systems of power and injustice in a world that [people] will see as simply economically inevitable" (Gee, 2000: 62).: In the expanding context of new literacies and multiliteracies, the abilities to know how to locate, to evaluate and to exploit Web information resources in order to construct knowledge, are acknowledged as extremely important worldwide. Current literacy curricula should encourage the development of such abilities, and  their successful implementation requires teachers themselves to be properly prepared. The present study reports the web searching and evaluating practices for educational purposes employed by both pre-service and in-service teachers. Data was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire. The comparative study  exhibis teachers' web practices with the purpose of identifying aspects of web literacy that require attention when designing and implementing relevant educational initiatives. According to the research findings, both pre-service and in-service teachers are based almost exclusively on popular search engines to locate web information resources, and they choose such resources without examining their wider context. In order to evaluate web information resources, they consider mainly morphological and design elements, rather than content features such as their origin and credibility. The findings raise the potential of applying critical literacy principles on the Web so that teachers can approach it critiquely.[1] when using its resources in educational settings. [1] learn to think “critiquely” (a word coined by James Paul Gee), that is, not merely consume information but also “understand and critique systems of power and injustice in a world that [people] will see as simply economically inevitable" (Gee, 2000: 62)

Development of a machine learning-based model to autonomously estimate web page credibility

There is a broad range of information available on the Internet, some of which is considered to be more credible than others. People consider different credibility aspects while evaluating the credibility of a web page, however, many web users find it difficult to determine the credibility of all types of web pages. An autonomous system that can analyze different credibility factors extracted from a web page to estimate the page's credibility could help users to make better decisions about the perceived credibility of the web information. This research investigated the applicability of several machine learning approaches to the evaluation of web page credibility. First, six credibility categories were identified from peer-reviewed literature. Then, their related credibility features were investigated and automatically extracted from the web page content, metadata, or external resources. Three sets of features (i.e., automatically extracted credibility features, bag of words features, and combination of both) were used in classification experiments to compare their impact on the autonomous credibility estimation model performance. The Content Credibility Corpus (C3) dataset was used to develop and test the performance of the model developed in this research. XGBoost achieved the best weighted average F1 score for extracted features. In comparison, the Logistic Regression classifier had the best performance when bag of words features was used, and all features together were used as a feature vector. To begin to explore the legitimacy of this approach, a crowdsourcing task was conducted to evaluate how the output of the proposed model aligns with the credibility ratings given by human annotators. Thirty web pages were selected from the C3 dataset to find out how current users' ratings correlate to the ratings that were used as ground truth to train the model. In addition, 30 new web pages were selected to explore how generalizable the algorithm is for classifying new web pages. Participants were asked to rate the credibility of each web page base on a 5-point Likert scale. Sixty-nine crowd-sourced participants evaluated the credibility of the 60 web pages for a total of 600 ratings (10 per page). Spearman's correlation between average credibility scores given by participants and original scores in the C3 dataset indicates a moderate positive correlation: r = 0.44, p < 0.02. A contingency table was created to compare the predicted scores by the model with the rated scores by participants. Overall, the model achieved an accuracy of 80%, which indicates that the proposed model can generalize for new web pages. The model outlined in this thesis outperformed the previous work by using a promising set of features that some of them were presented in this research for the first time

Undergraduate Students\u27 Information Literacy Behaviour in Chulalongkorn University

This paper examines the ways in which Thai undergraduate students in Chulalongkorn University find, evaluate, manage, and apply the needed information for doing their course-related assignments and everyday life research. The information literacy behaviour studied includes the undergraduates’ use of information resources, evaluation of information, research styles, and difficulties encountered during research practices. The survey instrument originally developed by Project Information Literacy of the University of Washington Information School was used as the basis for designing a questionnaire of this study. The questionnaire, then, was distributed to sophomores, juniors, and seniors enrolling at Chulalongkorn University. The sample for the student survey was 378 respondents from 18 faculties. Data collection was completed by the end of March 2011. Overall a 95% response rate was achieved. The findings of this study indicate that the most frequent source of information the majority of the undergraduates used for their course-related assignments and everyday life research is search engines. Most undergraduates always pay attention to credibility of library materials and web content when evaluating information in hand. Regarding the survey respondents’ research styles, they usually make action plans and create search terms before writing term-papers. They also have problems with deciding what to do at the early stage of research process, narrowing down a topic, and determining credibility of information resources