High School Students' Critical Evaluation of Scientific Resources on the World Wide Web

This research explores a new web-based curriculum idea, that of having students write and publish critical web “reviews” of scientific resources as a means of both practicing critical evaluation of web resources, and of making an authentic value-added contribution to the web. This paper presents content analyses of selected sections of 63 web reviews published by eleventh grade students in a project-based science class. Two aspects of critical evaluation are focused upon: summarization of content and evaluation of credibility. Content analyses show that student summaries were usually accurate, but had room for improvement especially in areas of comprehensiveness and level of detail. An ideal model of a content review is developed from analysis of a second set of reviews. When asked to evaluate credibility, students struggled to identify scientific evidence of claims in web resources, but analysis of web documents shows that this is often because such evidence is missing. Students could accurately determine the publishing source of web documents, but challenges arose in identifying potential biases. Recommendations for future iterations of this curriculum idea are presented throughout. A companion paper that will appear in this journal will examine how student reviews serve the function of social filtering on the web.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45185/1/10956_2004_Article_222061.pd

Teaching students to critically evaluate the quality of Internet research resources

The Internet offers a host of high-quality research material in computer science-and, unfortunately, some very low quality resources as well. As part of learning the research process, students should be taught to critically evaluate the quality of all documents that they use. This paper discusses the application of document evaluation criteria to WWW resources, and describes activities for including quality evaluation in a course on research methods