The information literacy practices of adolescents on social media outside of school are worth considering, since adolescents use social media near ubiquitously and must grapple with all types of content they encounter incidentally or intentionally. This scoping review followed the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) to examine the extent and nature of scholarship on this topic from the perspective of educational technology and literacy scholarship, as both fields are uniquely poised to collaborate on this interdisciplinary topic. Surprisingly, only four articles fit the scope of our review. The literature found, and not found, revealed several themes. These themes were the imprecise use of keywords across scholarship, use of social media for community support, exposure to incidental information, evidence for different literacy practices on social media, and the need for addressing social media information literacy in school. Opportunities for future work and collaborative research between both fields is also discussed.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the role skepticism plays among adolescents’ online information literacy skills.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors provide the conceptual grounding to operationalize and measure the notion of skepticism in an online information literacy context. Inspired by an existing measure known as the Skepticism Scale (Hurtt, 2010), the authors made substantial revisions to the scale to target middle school and high school students’ skepticism in six distinct, but related factors: questioning mind; search for knowledge; suspension of judgment; self-esteem; interpersonal understanding; and autonomy. The authors provide preliminary evidence of validity and reliability of the revised Skepticism Scale using Exploratory Factor Analysis and performed multiple linear regression using the Skepticism Scale measures to predict an adolescents’ online information literacy skills.
Findings
The Skepticism Scale was found to produce internally consistent constructs for all six measures. Three of the six measures were related to online information literacy skills, including the search for knowledge, interpersonal understanding and questioning mind.
Originality/value
This paper attempts to examine the potentially positive role of skepticism in information literacy skills among adolescents.
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