Internet scientific information seen by students of Compulsory Secondary Education: An exploratory study of their digital competences

Abstract

Nowadays, the Internet has become the first source of scientific information. This fact justifies the need for every citizen to have competences that allow the evaluation of contents and their reliability. This paper aims to explore and describe the digital competences, acquired inside or outside the classroom, which are manifested by a group of 4th year ESO students when they assess an Internet text on a scientific topic. The results indicate that the participants show good performance to identify ideas and position themselves regarding the information. However, they have difficulty making distant inferences, locating errors, interpreting information and rating their reliability. The results support the need to develop competences in classrooms to train citizens capable of being critical and objective when evaluating the enormous amount of information that they are exposed to.