Herramientas especializadas para el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras

Most students were aware that their professors would expect different kinds of sources than their high school teachers had expected. As Dustin said, “High school, it was credible. [The sources we used] were real, not fake ones, but never official scholarly stuff.” Kimberly said, “Like, dot- com, dot-org, those things were fine in high school but in this it’s like you need either dot-gov or an article or a book.” Kayla, who reported being aware of this shift in her first semester of college, elaborated,

In high school you had just Googled and found some. I knew definitely not to use Wikipedia or something like that, but I mean sometimes you’d grab a book. I mean you would just look it up and if it looks like a legitimate source then it was okay. College and I think definitely because of just the audience that we were writing for and how not necessarily serious, but I mean it’s not a joke anymore. It’s college. It’s a real research paper.

Other students, such as Elizabeth and Jesse, became more aware of this shift in expectations once they began taking advanced courses in their major. Elizabeth shared,

I don’t think that I knew to the extent of what it was until, I think, I took my junior seminar. Then, we were told that scholarly articles were the standard we were to be held

at, basically. Yeah. I think that was probably the first, I guess, solidifying moment for scholarly articles.

By their third year of college, most students reported being aware that they were being held to a higher standard for information use, namely the importance of scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles. However, scholarly or peer-reviewed, for many of the participants, became another criterion on their existing evaluation checklist.

Students’ comments did not suggest an evolution in critical, reflective, and analytical modes of thinking related to information literacy. Most students reported being taught the same basic set of evaluation criteria in high school, and they relied on these criteria when they first got to college. These criteria include looking at a website’s domain (e.g. .org, .gov, .edu), avoiding Wikipedia, looking at the author and publication date, and fact-checking a source by looking at other sources. The ways in which students described applying these criteria suggested that they approached information evaluation as a process of checking off boxes on a list. Brandon’s reflection on his high school research experiences demonstrates this, as he was quite literally required to fill out a form and check off criteria as he evaluated his sources. He explained,

I remember in high school we had…different colored papers. One website was one color…. I remember if you could fill out that page, as long as…it had an author or something. Even the company, if you were lookin’ up something and it had from an actual organization, stuff like that. I know the ending of a web address. We learned if it’s dot net it’s not—Wikipedia is not good, stuff like that.

Though other students had not used a literal checklist, they used figurative ones. For example, Michelle shared,

I know they would teach us to look up the endings of a website. In other words, a dot- com wouldn’t be as credible as, maybe, a dot-gov, or something like that. I guess they would also say, “Check the facts.” Like see if something’s a fact by looking at other websites to see if that information’s the same across the board, and not just take one website’s word for it.

One criterion that was notably absent from the participants’ high school experiences with evaluating information was determining the relevance of the source to their topic, argument, or research question, and the role a source could play in strengthening their work. In other words, students did not report learning how to think critically about the relationship between the information sources they were finding and the contextual nature of their information needed in high school.

This same checklist approach was evident in the ways that students reflected on their approaches to evaluating information for college-level research assignments, including for capstone projects. James and Emily’s approaches to finding and evaluating information for their capstone projects are representative of this. James shared,

I try to find recent ones. If it’s in the 1970s or something, I probably wouldn’t use those, but I try to find ones within the last five years, maybe ten years…. I’ll read the article the day beforehand. I’ll try to find unbiased articles and stuff like that, so you gotta to do that, and then depending on where it’s from, even when I go on [the online catalog] I’ll search something [to confirm the facts from information] that’s from a website that’s a new site, rather than a university.

I just used Google. I was much more aware of what sites were reputable. What research papers were okay to use. I knew what to look for in them. I knew as long as they had— usually if they had other sources at the bottom, that was always a good paper.

When asked about how they would approach finding sources for more recent research assignments, many students simply reported that they knew they needed credible sources, primarily scholarly or peer-reviewed sources, and described a checklist orientation similar to the evaluation strategies they reported learning in high school. Critical reflection on the relevance of the source to the students’ work and intentionality in how the source could be used to strengthen their research assignment remained notably absent from their evaluation criteria.