Exploring fourth graders' sourcing skills

Acquiring information from the Web creates new educational demands even in elementary school. Children need to scrutinize source information ('sourcng') to choose trustworthy information. So far, few studies have documented young readers' abilities to identify and evaluate source information. With two studies, we seek to gather more evidence on elementary students' sourcing skills and use. In study 1, we investigate to what extent fourth graders can identify source information and evaluate informants' expertise and intentions in simplistic, age-appropiate reading tasks. In study 2, we explore whether fourth graders spontaneusly apply their sourcing skills when reading simplified multiple documents. Results suggest that fourth graders can successfully identify source information and evaluate informants' expertise and intentions in simple and direct tasks but fail to apply this ability to more complex and implicit tasks. Implications for information literacy education are discussed.