1.
Paper presented at the IAMCR Conference “Communication and Citizenship”,
Braga, Portugal, 18­22 July 2010
Reliability vs. Authority: Difficulties Within Practices of
Credibility Assessment of Information by Highschool Students
and Teachers in Austria
Axel Maireder, University of Vienna
The Internet, social media in particular, has become an integral part of the
everyday life of youth. According to a recent study (GfK 2009) nearly a hundred
percent of the 13 to 17 year old Austrians use social media applications like
Facebook. Plentiful of studies researching the use of those means of
communication have been carried out in the last years (Gross 2004; J. Schmidt u.
a. 2009; Ito u. a. 2008; Wagner u. a. 2009). ‚Digital natives’ (Prensky 2001) hang
out, mess around and geek out (Ito u. a. 2008) in the web, which provides
communication spaces that fulfil functions of information, relationship and
identity management (J. Schmidt 2009).
Another communication space central to the life of teenagers is school, the place
the society ensures that children get prepared for the challenges and
requirements of life within this society (Fend 2006). This increasingly includes
competences on the use of information and communication technologies, which
are and will increasingly be central to social communication now and in the
future. One of those is the competency to reasonably assess the credibility of
information, which has become a key literacy in the knowledge society. Research
on the credibility assessment of information by students has been carried out by
a number of scholars (Franke & Sundin 2009; Rieh & Hilligoss 2007; Wathen &
Burkell 2002; Lorenzen 2001; Nicholas et. al. 2008), revealing worrisome
knowledge and competence gaps. However, those studies have primarily
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2. focused on the actual assessment of information within particular settings,
leaving aside the contexts in which these assessments are made. Our study tried
to close that gap.
Research Focus
Our project systematically asked for the terms, forms and consequences of
Internet use in schools and for school‐related tasks as well as the impact of the
school on Internet practices of teens, especially the development of competences
for information research and information processing. The initial assumption of
our cultural theory based project (Schmidt 2005, Bauer 2006), was that the
openness and universality of the Internet as well as its network structure are
contradicting the hierarchical, authoritarian model of school education, its
performance‐orientation and its sequential learning culture. The aim of the
project was to identify the communicative and cognitive practices that are
formed by students and teachers in the context of the Internet and school and to
evaluate those practices as challenges within the information society.
Method
For the collection of our data we carried out narrative group interviews
(Bohnsack 2004) with students and teachers in thirteen different classes from
ten different high schools in six Austrian provinces. The students were aged 13
to 16. Aiming for high heterogeneity, we selected schools / classes that
preferably differed in demographics, location and type of education: Schools in
rural, suburban and urban areas, with high, medium and low percentage of
immigrants and classes of two age groups (13/14 and 15/16 years old)
emphasising on either technical, commercial or general education. In each class
we asked the students to gather in groups of five people, aiming for groups of
individuals with low frictions. We chose the two groups that gathered fastest in
each class, assuming that those are the groups in which the individuals know
each other best. We also tried to keep an eye on the allocation of boys and girls
in the groups. As most of the groups were homogeneous in terms of gender
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3. anyway, we had one boy and one girl group in most of the cases. Altogether, 117
students took part in 26 group interviews. Additionally, we asked teachers in
each school to participate in group discussions separate from the students’ ones.
We conducted ten group interviews with 47 teachers altogether.
The group interviews conducted were very openly structured, aiming for lively
discussions between the participants rather than responses to specific
questions. Respectively, the moderation was low‐key, questions mostly
unspecific. The discussions lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were
recorded on tape. The qualitative analysis of the data was undertaken according
to the strategies provided by Grounded Theory (Strauss u. a. 1996; Glaser u. a.
2005; Krotz 2005): open coding, recoding, development of hypothesis, testing
and adapting hypothesis in a circular process.
Results
The analysis of our data showed phenomena within three categories: The use of
the Internet as a tool for and an object of educational instruction, as a medium
for communication between students about school and as a tool for the
accomplishment of school tasks. For this paper, only the third category will be
further addressed.
Austrian students use the Internet intensively for work on school tasks like
homework, the drafting of essays or the preparation of class presentations. The
usage of the Internet for those tasks is mostly neither guided by teachers nor
subject to any guidelines issued by teachers or school authorities. The use of the
Internet is rather implicitly taken for granted by both students and teachers,
mostly without addressing the respective practices. Most of the time, the
Internet is the only information source used by the students. Books, magazines,
journals are widely ignored by the students, even if the teachers encourage them
to make use of printed media. Even if the actual task is to read a book to write a
summary or to interpret it, students prefer to find related secondary and tertiary
literature on the Internet and use them as basis for their work rather than to
actually read the book itself.
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4. Research for information for school tasks starts almost always at one of two
websites. One is Google, which is researched using mostly one simple keyword
without combinations with additional words. Google’s results are scanned very
quickly according to the list provided and Links that are assumed to be relevant
are clicked. In this process the students assess Google’s ranking as a very
meaningful indicator of the respective Websites’ relevance and quality. Thus,
they hardly ever scan more than the first page of results and they go back to
Google every time after they have scanned a website it had linked to. If the
results of the first query are somewhat reasonable, only one is undertaken. The
choice of Google as the initial as well as central reference point in information
research practices is not surprising. Our findings support other studies in that
point (Rieh & Hilligoss 2008; Lorenzen 2001; for Austria Mager 2009).
The second website students use as their starting and reference point for
research is Wikipedia. It’s importance for students’ information gathering
practices can hardly be underestimated. The more so as the results showing up
in Google queries often list articles from Wikipedia at a high position. To both
Websites, Google and Wikipedia, students assign very high levels of credibility.
They are credible both on a conceptional and an operative level. The former
refers to the assessment of truthfulness based on certain concepts, the latter “to
the extent to which users think that the information is useful, good, current, and
accurate.“ (ibid, 146)
On a conceptional level, the students put trust into a quite vague concept of
‘Wisdom of the Crowds’ (Surowiecki 2005), assessing information more credible
the more people were involved in producing and evaluating it or the more
sources state the same particular information. The former refers to Wikipedia’s
concept of the collaboration of a multitude of authors and the respective check‐
and‐recheck mechanisms, the latter to Google under the students’ (wrong)
assumption that it ranks a page higher the more people consult it.
These assumptions starkly conflict with the teachers’ assessments of these
applications. They are very sceptical towards Google and in particular
Wikipedia. From their perspective, Wikipedia’s quality is doubtful, because the
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5. content can be edited by everyone, and there is no control on who is writing.
Google is assessed likewise. As it’s ranking is rather based on quantitative than
qualitative criteria, sources get more credit the more other pages link to it,
ignoring the quality of the information provided. While the youth values the
openness of information systems as well as the quantitative measurements they
are based on as a guarantee for the quality of information, the adults are
sceptical for the same considerations.
This corresponds to the change from an authorative credibility to a credibility by
reliability, which was described by Lankes (2007). The credibility of
information, traditionally assessed due to the rather stable authority of a certain
source is increasingly a question of credibility conversations, a consideration on
the basis of a multitude of sources.
Correspondingly, the students interviewed in our study report that they relate
information from different sources (from the Google results) to assess the
quality of a certain information on a regular bases. The problem is, that the
students often do not sufficiently understand the concepts and backgrounds of
the sources and information systems they get their information from, resulting
in misinterpretations. The critical attitude towards Google and Wikipedia of the
teachers can neither be understood nor agreed upon out of two reasons: First,
the teachers critique conflicts with their practices. Despite their critique, they
use both Google and Wikipedia on a regular basis for both private and school
purposes. The students notice that sharp contrast between theory and practice.
Second, students and teachers talk at cross purposes because of their different
interpretations of the same basic assumptions.
On the operative level ‐ the usefulness of information ‐ the views of students and
teachers accord: Sources that proved their value, information that proved
relevant, reasonable, coherent, applicable for the task it was researched for are
considered credible. Accordingly, both Google and Wikipedia are sources or
information systems respectively, teachers and students trust on an operative
level, resulting in an extensive use.
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6. Unfortunately, and that turns out to be a major problem, teachers often do not
evaluate the quality of information when grading student’s assignments. They
may evaluate the quality of the presentation or the language used, but rarely the
content ‐ the actual data and facts presented within a paper or oral presentation.
There are two major reasons for that: One is the workload associated with fact
checking and the other is their uncertainness related to information not
explicitly part of the curriculum.
However, as grading is the major feedback students need to get aware of what is
good and what is bad within their work, they are not getting aware of inaccurate
or even wrong information within their papers or – putting it the other way
around ‐ accordingly, little by little, ‘learn’ that the quality of information is less
relevant than the form it is presented in. Concurrently, they turn only sparse
attention to the accuracy of the information they process, putting little effort into
information research. Respectively they adjust their focus to the features of the
work the teachers evaluate, putting a lot of effort into the right composition,
style and design of their papers and oral presentations.
The practices the students mostly show when working on papers based on
information from the Internet range are simple copy‐and‐paste of website
content into their drafts and some minor adjusting of language style and design.
They rarely read the information they process intensively and writing text
mostly based on their own reasoning is a very seldom practice. Again, however,
the choice for a certain procedure is linked to the assumption of how the work
will be evaluated by the teacher, based on prior experiences.
Conclusion
The results of our project provide new and detailed insights into the changing
nature of credibility assessment from an authorative credibility to credibility by
reliability. Even if the results can’t be generalized as the culture of schooling is
different in other countries, the results from Austria can make researchers and
practitioners aware that certain problems in making today’s youth digitally
literate may also lie in problematic processes of interaction among teachers and
students.
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7. Acknowledgements
The research presented in this paper was part of a project funded by the
Austrian Ministry of Education. The research was conducted in collaboration
with with Manuel Nagl (researcher) and Thomas A. Bauer (supervisor).
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