Spontaneous Sourcing Strategies and Heuristics in Adolescents’ Evaluation of Online Information

In today’s information-rich environment, adolescents face significant challenges in evaluating the credibility of scientific content on social media. This study investigates how 130 high school students assessed the truthfulness of scientific and pseudoscientific Instagram-style posts in a classroom-based, ecologically valid setting. Participants provided written justifications for their judgments, which were thematically coded into 17 evaluative strategies grouped into three macro-categories: lateral reading, cues, and plausibility. Lateral reading was the most frequently used and correlated with higher judgment accuracy, though not significantly. Plausibility-based reasoning, by contrast, often led to incorrect classifications. Over 60% of students conducted external searches, but only half were judged effective. Notably, 40% of participants revised at least one judgment during the activity, and most of these revisions led to improved accuracy. The findings underscore the need for digital literacy interventions that promote reflective reasoning, effective search habits, and critical engagement with diverse epistemic resources.