Wading through a web of information
Highlights
- ACU research led by Associate Professor Laura Scholes found many teens struggle to critically evaluate online information, often distrusting sites like Wikipedia and instead relying on single “trusted” sources like teachers or parents.
- Only a small minority of students demonstrated strong critical thinking skills online, such as comparing multiple sources, assessing credibility, and weighing differing viewpoints.
- The study highlights the need for stronger digital literacy education to help young people navigate misinformation, algorithm-driven content, and information overload more effectively.
A close friend approaches to tell you they’re concerned about the health risks of using their mobile phone. You’re a trusted mate, and they’re keen to hear your opinion about the safety of their device. “I’m no expert,” you say to your friend, “but let me do some research and get back to you.”
If you’re like most people, at this point you’d head straight to Google, typing something like “mobile phone health risks” into the search bar. This would give you some 400 million sources of information on mobile phones and health; however, even within the top 10 results, the info is inconsistent. Some entries say there’s no established scientific evidence that the use of mobile phones comes with health risks. Others claim that research has shown significant adverse effects – including brain cancer.
So, which source of information would you rely on, and why? How would you know that the info is trustworthy?
These questions were put to a cohort of Australian middle school students who participated in newly published research led by ACU's Laura Scholes, Associate Professor at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education.
Titled ‘Many truths, many knowledges, many forms of reason’, the study included a scenario similar to the one above, requiring the participants – aged 13 and 14 – to explore the health risks associated with mobile phone use. One-on-one interviews were conducted to elicit their responses to the situation, enabling the researchers to explore student approaches to sourcing and evaluating information online.
“This is a crucial period of schooling, when students tend to go from mostly reading narrative storybooks to reading informational texts across the curriculum, and that requires different skills,” says Associate Professor Scholes, whose research has focused on literacy, reading in the digital age, and the development of critical thinking.
“At this age, the expectations on students start to rise, and a lot of the time they don’t have the sophisticated skills required to evaluate conflicting accounts on complex issues, especially when they’re gathering information on digital platforms.”
Mistrust of the internet
In an era when the internet is a ubiquitous part of our lives, and when many teenagers are almost constantly online, it would be easy to assume that they’d trust information sourced in the digital realm.
And yet, more than half of those who took part in the study expressed mistrust of the internet. Several students labelled it as “unreliable”, conveying a belief that online sources like Google, Wikipedia and the like were tenuous and biased.
It might be argued that this level of scepticism of the internet is healthy. The problem, says Associate Professor Scholes, is that it fails to appreciate the breadth of reliable information available online.
Take Wikipedia, which many students are discouraged from using as a research tool. Despite teething problems in its early years, the website – created around the notions of consensus and collaboration – has grown to become an increasingly reliable source. It has been described by some as “the last good place on the internet”, but many students raised doubts about its reliability.
“If it’s Wikipedia, it’s obviously not reliable because anyone could write it,” said Dylan, one of the students surveyed.
Another, named Cara, said it could “really easily [be] hacked and there are lots of opinions that are really different”.
Students appeared to have little knowledge of the checks and balances that Wikipedia has in place to combat misinformation.
“We got the feeling the students were saying what they thought they should say, which in this case was ‘Don’t trust Wikipedia’, even though it is now highly regarded as a prominent information resource by many professionals,” says Associate Professor Scholes, who co-authored the study alongside Dr Sarah McDonald, Dr Garth Stahl, and Professor Barbara Comber.
“These might just be messages they’re getting in a school context, because teachers are warning students about misinformation and disinformation online, so it could be that they’ve internalised concerns about the falsehoods and competing theories that infiltrate the internet.”
Associate Professor Scholes
Student doubts about the reliability of digital sources extended to news websites, with one participant saying that online journalists could “say whatever they want”.
Rather than relying on the internet for the “right” information, these students opted to defer to adults – parents, teachers, scientists, and experts – whom they considered more trustworthy.
Josie suggested she would “not go into Google ‘cause Google’s not always right”. Instead, she would seek information from “someone [whose] job is to help people with stuff like this … someone like a school helper maybe”.
This reliance on adults as a single source of truth could also be problematic, says Associate Professor Scholes, because it suggests that students aren’t engaging in self-guided critical thinking.
“Just blindly taking one person’s opinion as fact is incredibly problematic, even if that person is a scientist,” she says.
“Many of these students don’t appreciate that the body of scientific knowledge is continually evolving – it’s not just fact, it’s a constant questioning and re-examining of evidence to gain new knowledge.
