How do source evaluation criteria develop? A microgenetic study of growth of epistemic ideals

In a modern world rife with misinformation, people encounter information from diverse sources and need to be able to evaluate their credibility. The aim of our study was to examine when and how students adopt novel source credibility evaluation criteria. Using the microgenetic method, we tracked the emergence of source credibility evaluation criteria among 20 ninth-grade students who engaged in collaborative inquiry tasks with multiple scientific documents over 13 weekly sessions. Students were individually interviewed six times to trace changes in their criteria. The findings revealed that all students adopted new criteria over time. Benevolence, integrity, and validation criteria emerged later than expertise, venue professionality, and recency criteria. Criteria use exhibited diverse patterns including steady use, step-like change, and wave-like change. Several conditions facilitated the emergence of novel criteria: encounters with diverse sources (especially low-quality ones), metacognitive elaboration of the meaning of criteria, and social interactions that encouraged attention to source quality. These findings show that learners can identify and adopt novel source evaluation criteria when these bear meaningfully on their goals. Our study also uncovers the conditions and trajectories of adoption of source evaluation criteria. These findings can inform the design of learning environments and instruction for supporting critical source evaluation.