Students' evaluation strategies in a Web research task: Are they sensitive to relevance and reliability?

When searching and using resources on the Web, students have to evaluate Web pages in terms of relevance and reliability. This evaluation can be done in a more or less systematic way, by either considering deep or superficial cues of relevance and reliability. The goal of this study was to examine how systematic students are when evaluating Web pages. Forty-two undergraduate students performed a Web research task. They were provided with a search-engine results page including 12 Web pages, which were relevant/irrelevant and reliable/unreliable. The students had to navigate the pages for 30 min to prepare for a subsequent test on a target topic. Their navigation behaviors were video-recorded and analyzed. The findings revealed that the students were not systematic when accessing the pages: They accessed more unreliable pages than reliable pages. The pattern was different when considering study time: The students allocated more time to relevant and reliable pages. Finally, allocating additional time to relevant Web pages was associated with better learning from the materials. Overall, the results suggest that undergraduate students are able to deploy systematic evaluations of Web resources and this is crucial for achieving learning.