Development and Assessment of an Educational Program Aimed at Cultivating Thinking to Evaluate Information Credibility Based on the Communication Pathways

Abstract

Recently it is common among young people to obtain information via social media. Nevertheless, learning methods focused on the characteristics of communication pathways with regard to information disseminated through social media have not been established. While there exists abundant primary information on social media, in some cases, the primary information is mediated by multiple individuals and is often difficult for the recipient to understand. Based on the assumption that evaluating the credibility of information via social media requires a consideration of the 「communication pathways」 and evaluation of the credibility of mediators, we developed a learning program aimed at cultivating thinking to evaluate the credibility of information based on the 「communication pathways」 and verified its efficacy in a university class. The efficacy of the program was analyzed with regard to two areas of 「thinking」: 「thinking skills」 and 「thinking dispositions」. Our study confirmed a certain level of efficacy in both areas, but at the same time, some differences in its efficacy between the two areas were also identified, including time differences in the learning effect and differences in the training methods required for developing the two areas of thinking.