Improving university students’ web savvy: An intervention study

Background Young people increasingly turn to the Internet for information about social and political issues. However, they struggle to evaluate the trustworthiness of the information they encounter online. Aims This pilot study investigated whether a focused curricular intervention could improve university students’ ability to make sound judgements of credibility. Sample Participants (n = 67) were students in four sections of a ‘critical thinking and writing’ course at a university on the West Coast of the United States. Course sections were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 29) and control conditions (n = 38). Methods We conducted a pre‐and‐posttest, treatment/control experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 design (treatment condition × order × time) with repeated measures on the last factor. Students in the treatment group received two 75‐min lessons on evaluating the credibility of online content. An assessment of online reasoning was administered to students 6 weeks prior to the intervention and again 5 weeks after. Results Students in the treatment group were significantly more likely than students in the control group to have shown gains from pretest to posttest. Conclusions Results suggest that teaching students a small number of flexible heuristics that can be applied across digital contexts can improve their evaluation of online sources.