2023

Lavi, Riitta; Räikkönen, Eija; Kiili, Carita

This study examined vocational school students’ (N = 82) critical online reading skills. Additionally, we examined how students’ prior knowledge, reading order of the texts, and credibility justification ability were associated with students’ credibility evaluation performance. Students (studying in the field of well-being, hair, or beauty) read and evaluated two more credible and two less credible online texts about the effects of sugar consumption in a web-based environment. Almost a fifth of students could not confirm the credibility of more credible texts and question the credibility of less credible texts. Further, nearly half of the students ranked the less credible text among the two most credible texts. Regression analysis revealed that the better students’ justification skills were, the better they were able to confirm the credibility of the more credible texts, question the credibility of less credible texts, and rank the texts according to their credibility.