Leu et al. conducted an empirical study on 13-year old US school children's ability to critically evaluate online information for reliability. The sample included the top quartile of school children in samples from the states of Connecticut and South Carolina. Each school child was exposed to the spoof site "Save The Northwest Pacific Tree Octopus", devoted to this rare species of octopus, complete with pictures of the animal itself and its environment. The school children then received a short, fictitious, message from another class, asking them to locate and evaluate the reliability of the website. They were to provide three reasons for their answer, and summarize the most important information from that website in one or two sentences. Then they were asked to send their information via IM, email, or to post this on a blog site. Following the activity, school children were interviewed to ensure that they were familiar with the term "reliable," an important concept in the task. When asked what this term meant, all responded with answers indicating that they understood the term. See also. In the spring of 2017, Loos, Ivan & Leu replicated the study in a Dutch school class of 27 children in the following way: The teacher and the school children were told by the first author of the study that the lesson that would follow would be an online reading comprehension exercise; the real purpose of the lesson was not revealed in advance. The children were asked by the scholar to visit the abovementioned website. They were given the following instructions: “Have a look at this website. Look at the pictures, click on the links if you wish. Do not hurry, you have time enough. And this is not a test. It will not be graded.” The website was automatically translated to Dutch, a facility offered by the Chromebook they all used. Then, they were asked to answer the following questions: This website presents an octopus living in trees. What country does this animal live in?, According to the website, this particular octopus is an endangered species. For what reason?, If Greenpeace were to ask you to save this octopus, would you support this and sign? YES, because... NO, because..., Were there parts of the website you didn't understand? If so, please explain., Are there any other comments about this website you would like to make?" Hence, these school children thought the text was about their willingness to undertake action for an endangered animal. The pupils who answered ‘YES’ to question were judged as perceiving the site as a reliable one. In this way, it was not necessary to explicitly ask about the reliability of the site, which would have risked priming them. The school children were debriefed after the session and they received a new media literacies training.
Results
The 2007 US study found that slightly more than half of the 53 school children taking part in the study reported the website as being very reliable. Only 6 out of the 53 school children viewed the website as unreliable. Each of these 6 school children had just participated in a lesson that used this website to teach them to be suspicious of information online. In the 2017 Dutch study only 2 out of the total 27 school children recognized that the website was a hoax. The setting of the task, the trust in their teacher and the scholar, and the emotional involvement might have made it more difficult for them to perceive the information on the website as fake. Several told the scholar they were shocked that they had considered the digital information on the website to be reliable, as they had received several new literacies training at school over the past year.
