Measuring what matters: Investigating what new types of assessments reveal about students’ online source evaluations

Abstract

A growing number of educational interventions have shown that students can learn the strategies fact checkers use to efficiently evaluate online information. Measuring the effectiveness of these interventions has required new approaches to assessment because extant measures reveal too little about the processes students use to evaluate live internet sources. In this paper, we analyze two types of assessments developed to meet the need for new measures. We describe what these assessments reveal about student thinking and how they provide practitioners, policymakers, and researchers options for measuring participants’ evaluative strategies.