Abstract
How do undergraduate students make sense of the information they encounter online? Building on our previous work on "the container conundrum" (Russo et al., 2019), which reckoned with the difficulties students experience as non-experts evaluating information they encounter in a browser, we designed a study to investigate how students perceive online sources. Researchers have studied various aspects of online source evaluation behaviors of students and other information users (Aslett, 2023; Haider & Sundin, 2022; Leeder, 2019; Meola, 2004; Metzger et al., 2010; Rieh, 2014; Silva et al., 2018). Our research examines the perception of shape in information (Dillon, 2025) and cognitive authority through the lens of our demographically unique student population.
Our context: We are all librarians at the University of New Mexico, a research university and Hispanic-Serving institution in the southwestern United States. Our undergraduate student population is diverse, approximately 50% Hispanic, 29% White, 6% Native American, with a small but significant international student population. We are also teaching librarians who regularly work with undergraduates, previously serving as subject liaison librarians for a wide range of disciplines. Two of us regularly teach a general education course, IADL 1110 Introduction to Information Studies, a portion of which is dedicated to source evaluation.
Using semi-structured interviews, we directed 15 student participants to review and reflect on websites selected during a Google search, giving students five to ten minutes to examine each site. During this reflective process, we asked several questions including: What do you notice first on this page? What can you do here? How would you characterize the information on this page? Do you trust the information that you have found here? Why or why not?
We are analyzing the responses using inductive thematic coding to gain insight into students' evaluative processes and conceptions of information formats. Our preliminary analysis has revealed some patterns in how students approach digital information sources, including:
● Personal stories demonstrated authority in terms of personal, lived experience.
● Links were viewed as indicators of evidence, akin to references.
● Participants reported that rigorous evaluative efforts were not normally part of how they interacted with websites.
● The presence of quantitative information signaled reliability.
● Advertisements, both their relevance to the website under consideration and perceived purposes, were used by participants to make evaluative judgments.
●Sources perceived as "factual and unbiased" were more likely to be trusted, while those seen as opinion-based faced greater skepticism.
● Students engaged with sources in smart, complex ways, making suppositions about website purposes and connecting them to their own personal positionalities.
We will use anonymized student quotes and video clips from our interviews to illustrate how students evaluated websites in the study. Attendees will gain practical insights into how undergraduate students approach source evaluation, which may challenge some common assumptions about student understandings and inform how we teach information literacy.
References
Aslett, K., Sanderson, Z., Godel, W., Persily, N., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2023). Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity. Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, 625(7995), 548–556. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y
Dillon, A. (2025). Genres as Shape: Forms, Norms, and Connoisseurship. Library Trends 74(1), 4-21. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lib.2025.a970674
Haider, J., & Sundin, O. (2022). Information literacy challenges in digital culture: conflicting engagements of trust and doubt. Information, Communication & Society, 25(8), 1176–1191. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1851389
Leeder, C. (2019). How college students evaluate and share “fake news” stories. Library & Information Science Research, 41(3), 100967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2019.100967
Meola, M. (2004). Chucking the checklist: A contextual approach to teaching undergraduates web-site evaluation. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4(3), 331–344.
Metzger, M. J., Flanagin, A. J., & Medders, R. B. (2010). Social and heuristic approaches to credibility evaluation online. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 413–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01488.x
Rieh, S. Y. (2014). Credibility assessment of online information in context. Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice, 2(3), 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1633/JISTaP.2014.2.3.1
Russo, A., Jankowski, A., Beene, S., & Townsend, L. (2019). Strategic source evaluation: addressing the container conundrum. Reference Services Review, 47(3), 294-313. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-04-2019-0024
Silva, E., Green, J., & Walker, C. (2018). Source evaluation behaviours of first-year university students. Journal of Information Literacy, 12(2), 24–43. https://doi.org/10.11645/12.2.2512
