Narratives and Their Impact on Students’ Information Seeking and Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education Economics and Medicine

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22167091
AutoresMukulika Banerjee (0000-0002-7667-9844, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, autor de correspondencia), Olga Zlatkin‐troitschanskaia (0000-0002-7431-9538, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), Jochen Roeper (0000-0003-2145-8742, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Año2020
Volumen5
Fecha de publicación2020-11-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFrontiers in Education (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2504-284X • E-ISSN: 2504-284X
EditorialFrontiers Media SA (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.3389/feduc.2020.570625
OpenAlexW3098099638
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas63

The digital and information age has fundamentally transformed the way in which students learn and the study material they have at their disposal, especially in higher education. Students need to possess a number of higher-order cognitive and metacognitive skills, including effective information processing and critical reasoning to be able to navigate the Internet and use online sources, even those found outside of academically curated domains and in the depths of the Internet, and to solve (domain-specific) problems. Linking qualitative and quantitative research and connecting the humanities to empirical educational science studies, this paper investigates the role of narratives and their impact on university students’ information seeking and their critical online reasoning (COR). This study focuses on the link between students’ online navigation skills, information seeking behavior and critical reasoning with regard to the specific domains: economics and medicine. For the empirical analysis in this paper, we draw on a study that assesses the critical online reasoning (COR) skills of undergraduate students of economics and medicine at two German universities. To measure COR skills, we used five tasks from the computer-based assessment “Critical Online Reasoning Assessment” (CORA), which assesses students’ skills in critically evaluating online sources and reasoning using evidence on contentious issues. The conceptual framework of this study is based on an existing methodology – narrative economics and medicine – and discusses its instructional potential and how it can be used to develop a new tool of ’wise interventions’ to enhance students’ COR in higher education. Based on qualitative content analyses of the students’ written responses, i.e. short essays, three distinct patterns of information seeking behavior among students have been identified. These three patterns – “Unambiguous Fact-Checking”, “Perspective-Taking without Fact-Checking”, and “Web Credibility-Evaluating” – differ substantially in their potential connection to underlying narratives of information used by students to solve the CORA tasks. This analysis suggests that training university students in narrative analysis can strongly contribute to enhancing their critical online reasoning

Cognition · Critical thinking · Higher education · Knowledge management · Mathematics education · Metacognition · Narrative · The Internet · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology