Handbook of Multiple Source Use

Jason L.G. Braasch, Ivar Bråten, Matthew T. McCrudden, Jason L.G. Braasch, Ivar Bråten, Matthew T. McCrudden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317238195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Psicología educativa

The Handbook of Multiple Source Use draws on theory and research within cognitive and educational psychology, the learning sciences, disciplinary education, information literacy, reading psychology, and social psychology, to present the first comprehensive research volume on this topic. Many learners both in and out of school have almost instantaneous access to an enormous range of information sources at present. In this book, broken into six sections, international scholars come together toward understanding factors that influence how individuals cope with the challenge of building knowledge from diverse, often conflicting, information.

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INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH ON MULTIPLE SOURCE USE

Jason L. G. Braasch

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS, USA

Ivar Bråten

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO, NORWAY

Matthew T. McCrudden

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND

INTRODUCTION

As consumers of information, we live in unprecedented times, especially given the centrality of the Internet in our daily lives. We have rapid access to a staggering amount of information from diverse information sources. This is in sharp contrast to previous generations that had to physically seek out information from a relatively narrow set of source types to be informed about different topics (e.g., reading an excerpt from an encyclopedia at a library to learn about a historical event, purchasing a newspaper from a local store to keep up with recent news), or perhaps rely on the evening news to stay informed.

The Information Age has – of course – changed how people access, use, and understand information, which provides us with important opportunities. We can easily and almost instantaneously retrieve up-to-date information from a broad spectrum of sources that provide us with a rich body of information covering the gamut of what we would want or need to know about anything, from key information about important issues to subtle minutiae. At the same time, information consumers must face and overcome many new challenges. Readers in the current Information Age need traditional reading skills, such as the ability to decode the meaning of words and understand the gist of a sentence. However, they also need to be able to acquire and flexibly use a diverse set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to guide their selection, processing, and use of information from multiple information sources (Alexander & The Disciplined Reading and Learning Research Laboratory, 2012; Brand-Gruwel & Stadtler, 2011; Bråten, Braasch, & Salmerón, in press; Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013; OECD, 2013).

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This chapter provides an introduction to research on multiple source use. It is important to note that, across the chapters in the Handbook, there is some variability in how different authors use the term source, and – as such – what is meant by multiple source use. In a broader sense, the term source is considered synonymous and used interchangeably with terms like information resource, text, document, or multimedia resource (e.g., those including text alongside photos or videos). In this way, the term source reflects a body of information that is distinct and demarcated from other bodies of information (Wiley, Jaeger, & Griffin, this volume). In a more restricted and different sense, others use the term source with reference to metadata information embedded within or provided outside the body of information, including its origin, context, and purpose, to name but a few (Barzilai & Strømsø, this volume; Britt, Rouet, & Braasch, 2013). Accordingly, what is meant by multiple source use necessarily differs depending on how one is defining source. In the former, broader sense, multiple source use refers to an individual’s ability to construct meaning from multiple bodies of information through engagement in a broad range of processes. These can include: interpreting the task, locating, selecting, analyzing, evaluating, comprehending, and transforming information, while also corroborating, integrating, and constructing ideas within and across sources (Barzilai & Strømsø, this volume; Gil, Bråten, Vidal-Abarca, & Strømsø, 2010; Goldman & Scardamalia, 2013). In the latter, more narrow sense, multiple source use refers to an individual’s propensity to attend to, represent, evaluate, and apply available or accessible metadata features embedded within or provided outside bodies of information, e.g., reading and evaluating “About us” information on a website to determine whether the author is biased in making a specific claim (Bråten & Braasch, this volume; Bråten, Stadtler, & Salmerón, in press). All told, the next section presents research on multiple source use in both senses of the term, from the more general to the more specific. Importantly, several authors in this area of research argue that multiple source use – in both senses of the term – interact in constructing a more complete understanding of a situation, topic, or phenomenon (e.g., Britt, Rouet, & Braasch, 2013).

RESEARCH ON MULTIPLE SOURCE USE

As information has proliferated and as information sources have diversified over the past several decades, so too has research on multiple source use. Seminal, early studies on multiple source use in academic contexts (Hartman, 1995; Perfetti, Britt, & Georgi, 1995; Rouet, Britt, Mason, & Perfetti, 1996; Stahl, Hynd, Britton, McNish, & Bosquet, 1996; Wineburg, 1991) have paved the way for contemporary investigations focused on understanding multiple source use within both academic and non-academic settings. This ever-expanding research literature has provided theories of multiple source use, rich descriptions and explanations of readers’ engagement in activities that promote or constrain their use of multiple sources, and prescriptions for designing educational interventions that target multiple source use.

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The remaining chapters in this volume provide an extensive review of theory and research on multiple source use; in this chapter we introduce several competencies that seem particularly important in today’s information-rich society, many of which interact in complex ways. For example, when individuals initiate an inquiry on the Internet, they must be able to locate and evaluate information returned by search engines. Such activities include planning what search terms will be used, scanning and skimming the search results to identify texts that may prove useful, monitoring the status of what useful texts were found relative to the reader’s goals and threshold for task completion, and revising search terms to get a better set of results (Braasch et al., 2009; Brand-Gruwel, Kammerer, van Meeuwen, & van Gog, in press; Greene, Yu, & Copeland, 2014; Kammerer, Bråten, Gerjets, & Strømsø, 2013; Salmerón, Kammerer, & García-Carrión, 2013).

When accessing full texts, more effective multiple source users evaluate information based on several dimensions including quality, authenticity, relevance, and reliability, all through the lens of an individual’s current reading goals (Bråten, McCrudden, Stang Lund, Brante, & Strømsø, in press; McCrudden & Schraw, 2007). For example, people can validate information they come across based on what they already believe and know, including what they may have just read (Goldman, Braasch, Wiley, Graesser, & Brodowinska, 2012; O’Brien & Cook, 2016; Richter & Maier, 2017; Stadtler & Bromme, 2014). This validation process could result in confirmation if similar or complementary ideas were previously encountered, or in noticing that new information directly conflicts with prior beliefs or knowledge (Braasch & Bråten, 2017; Braasch, McCabe, & Daniel, 2016; Stadtler, Scharrer, Brummernhenrich, & Bromme, 2013). Furthermore, we often interact with multiple sources that contain a mixture of information, only some of which is relevant given our current inquiry. In this sense, readers must also be equipped with the skills to determine the extent to which information is relevant to their current reading goals (Anmarkrud, McCrudden, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2013; Bråten et al., in press; McCrudden, Stenseth, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2016).

People must also consider text features that can help them to determine the reliability of information they encounter (Britt, Rouet, & Braasch, 2013; Thomm & Bromme, 2012). If readers use information sources from the Internet, for example, they must be aware that such information may not have undergone any explicit review policies or quality control compared to most paper-based publications. Prior to the arrival of the Internet, readers could defer to information providers, such as editors and publishing companies, in reducing the amount of unreliable information they may have encountered. However, the current information boom has shifted the responsibility of evaluating the reliability of information to the readers themselves, including the credibility of the sources. Thus, effective, efficient multiple source use requires that individuals incorporate sourcing strategies into their daily reading routines. These strategies help people to focus information processing efforts on information that is reliable and from more credible sources, and to more actively scrutinize, disregard, or actively refute information that is less reliable or from less credible sources. Thus, reliability evaluations may stem from two separate, but related facets of texts. First, one can establish reliability based on a more critical analysis of the semantic content provided by information sources. For example, a more critical person could determine a text’s content is less reliable if it offers a claim with no supporting evidence, or the claim outstrips the available data (e.g., a strong causal claim using correlational data as support). Second, one can establish reliability based on a more critical analysis of the source features that are available. For example, a more critical person might use source features, such as an author’s credentials, to infer bias in presenting a claim. Similarly, an individual might deduce that the publication venue has ulterior motives in posting some information on their website. Thus, sourcing, in particular, reflects a complex set of competencies that include attending to, representing, evaluating, and using features of information sources (Bråten, Stadtler, & Salmerón, in press). Source features can include information about the author’s credentials (or lack thereof), the type and date of publication, and publication genre (e.g., a personal blog versus an online magazine article), to name but a few. Whereas these features surely help effective readers determine the reliability of content presented within multiple sources, the Internet provides for additional sourcing challenges. Source features that are typically available in printed texts may be masked, unavailable, or – at times – extremely hard to interpret on many websites (Britt & Gabrys, 2000; Flanagin & Metzger, 2008).

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It is also common that the complete answer to an individual’s question requires an integration of relevant information that is distributed across multiple sources (Cho & Afflerbach, 2017). In this sense, a number of processes may be involved including elaboration of complementary ideas, and noticing and rectifying experiences of cognitive conflicts, to name but a few. Related to this point, effective readers tend to monitor the status of a mental model they are gradually constructing during reading (Goldman et al., 2012). When the learner has successfully met their subjective threshold for acceptability (List & Alexander, 2017) and satisfied their goals for reading (McCrudden & Schraw, 2007), the task is considered completed.

But what if a reader doesn’t have the requisite knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively engage with multiple sources? Alternatively, what if they lack motivation to do so? If this is the case, several problems can arise. For example, readers may experience “information overload” if they are unable or unwilling to distinguish between more and less relevant information to satisfy their purposes for reading. Similarly, if readers are unable or unwilling to focus their information processing efforts toward more reliable, higher-quality information provided by credible sources, they may continue to endorse misconceptions, or create new ones. Moreover, if readers do not strategically integrate relevant concepts into a coherent mental representation, they may come away with an assortment of unconnected facts and concepts (Goldman, 2004).

This brief introduction offers an overview of the complexities involved in multiple source use. Coordinating these component processes is no small feat. Multiple source use demands a great deal of cognitive resources and adeptness in knowing when, how, and why one should engage in these different mental activities at the various stages of inquiry outlined above. To date, a significant body of research has emerged that reflects major advances toward theory development and empirical investigations of multiple source use, as well as tests of educational practices designed to support it. The following chapters, and the larger literature base from which they are drawn, were gathered to connect ideas offered by the different disciplines studying multiple source use.

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GOALS OF THIS HANDBOOK

We had two main goals for this Handbook of Multiple Source Use. One goal was to provide a comprehensive survey of research to describe when, how, and why readers use multiple sources. For the first time, theoretical advancements and empirical investigations of multiple source use in both formal and informal contexts are covered in a single volume. Author contributions focus on the theoretical and practical implications of the work reviewed, describe current challenges in the area, and offer recommendations for future research. Thus, each chapter provides substantial depth that readers may seek within their particular topics of interest.

In addition to depth, our second goal was to organize the Handbook in a way that affords opportunities for cross-fertilization across disciplines, broadening the readers’ knowledge base with respect to key issues that cut across the various themes. Colloquially speaking, researchers interested in multiple...