"Whether I agree with it or not”: Factors shaping students’ citational accuracy when writing about popular sources

Type of Presentation

Panel

Conference Strand

Diversity and Inclusion

Target Audience

Higher Education

Second Target Audience

Higher Education

Location

Ogeechee Theater

Relevance

Reports on interaction between student identity characteristics, source features, and source use accuracy when writing about popular sources in first year writing courses. Questions typical deficit/strength narratives told about information literacy skills of minoritized/majoritized students. Suggests ways to recognize in assignment design and assessment the critical information literacy skills of minoritized students and cultivate these skills in majoritzed students to bring them up to minoritized students' level.

Proposal

This session will highlight findings from a research collaboration between first-year writing instructors and librarians to develop a research-based writing curriculum based on the Association of College and Research Libraries' Framework for Information Literacy, the CWPA/NCTW/NWP Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, and the Trust Project, extending the interdisciplinary collaboration of D'Angelo et al (2016). Building on the work of the Citation Project and the Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum Project with students' writing about peer-reviewed sources, this project develops and assesses students’ information literacy when writing about popular sources, an increasingly pressing civic responsibility in the current news and information landscape (see Skinnell, 2021; Pérez-Escoda et al, 2024).

We share results from this study of student source evaluation and integration, highlighting three findings. First, when writing about popular sources, students mischaracterized at least one key aspect of the source (its content, genre, publication type, or author expertise) 38% of the time, echoing findings by Project Information Literacy (2018). However, this figure varied widely according to source genre/type: while students characterized information from video sources appropriately 80% of the time, they frequently mischaracterized information from articles summarizing studies and articles on business and nonprofit websites (50% and 56% of the time). Second, we consider the relationship between the purposes sources serve in student writing and the content of the sources (building on Doolan, 2021; Wette, 2021), considering the extent to which students use individual sources and how varied their purposes for source use are. Third, because a previous iteration of this study found that minoritized students demonstrated substantially more sophisticated critical information literacy metaknowledge than majoritized students, we also investigate whether this trend carries over into the equally important consideration of accuracy of source representation in students’ writing, considering – in addition to the impact of source genre/type – the relationship of student characteristics like race, gender, first generation status, country of origin to the accuracy of students’ writing about their sources.

Short Description

We report a study of first-year writing students’ information literacy using popular sources. Previous results have shown that although students overall struggle to write about popular sources, minoritized students demonstrate more sophisticated skills than their majoritized peers. This study examines whether that finding holds when considering factors like source genre, source length, and purpose of source use.

Keywords

citation accuracy, source genre, minoritized students, popular sources

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Feb 8th, 9:00 AM Feb 8th, 9:45 AM

"Whether I agree with it or not”: Factors shaping students’ citational accuracy when writing about popular sources

Ogeechee Theater

This session will highlight findings from a research collaboration between first-year writing instructors and librarians to develop a research-based writing curriculum based on the Association of College and Research Libraries' Framework for Information Literacy, the CWPA/NCTW/NWP Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, and the Trust Project, extending the interdisciplinary collaboration of D'Angelo et al (2016). Building on the work of the Citation Project and the Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum Project with students' writing about peer-reviewed sources, this project develops and assesses students’ information literacy when writing about popular sources, an increasingly pressing civic responsibility in the current news and information landscape (see Skinnell, 2021; Pérez-Escoda et al, 2024).

We share results from this study of student source evaluation and integration, highlighting three findings. First, when writing about popular sources, students mischaracterized at least one key aspect of the source (its content, genre, publication type, or author expertise) 38% of the time, echoing findings by Project Information Literacy (2018). However, this figure varied widely according to source genre/type: while students characterized information from video sources appropriately 80% of the time, they frequently mischaracterized information from articles summarizing studies and articles on business and nonprofit websites (50% and 56% of the time). Second, we consider the relationship between the purposes sources serve in student writing and the content of the sources (building on Doolan, 2021; Wette, 2021), considering the extent to which students use individual sources and how varied their purposes for source use are. Third, because a previous iteration of this study found that minoritized students demonstrated substantially more sophisticated critical information literacy metaknowledge than majoritized students, we also investigate whether this trend carries over into the equally important consideration of accuracy of source representation in students’ writing, considering – in addition to the impact of source genre/type – the relationship of student characteristics like race, gender, first generation status, country of origin to the accuracy of students’ writing about their sources.