Is the environmental literacy of university students measurable?

We report the development and piloting of an evaluative instrument and process for monitoring the environmental literacy (EL) of undergraduate students in one large research-led university in New Zealand. The instrument addresses knowledge, affect and competencies in the general area of EL in line with this institution’s adoption of EL as a graduate attribute (or in a US context, a general-education learning outcome, and something to be fostered throughout a student’s education). The instrument and associated processes were designed to fit within conventional institutional mechanisms that manage student feedback on the quality of teaching. The instrument was tested with more than 600 students from more than eight programmes over the course of a year and its use stressed that students were anonymous within the survey. We conclude that evaluating (or in a US context, assessing) the extent to which students acquire EL is an achievable objective and is a reasonable expectation for any higher education institution that claims to foster this attribute.     

Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe?

This research investigates university students’ determinations of credibility of information on Web sites, confidence in their determinations, and perceptions of Web site authors’ vested interests. In Study 1, university-level computer science and education students selected Web sites determined to be credible and Web sites that exemplified misrepresentations. Categorization of Web site credibility determinations indicated that the most frequently provided reasons associated with high credibility included information focus or relevance, educational focus, and name recognition. Reasons for knowing a Web site’s content is wrong included lack of corroboration with other information, information focus and bias. Vested interests associated with commercial Web sites were regarded with distrust and vested interests of educational Web sites were not. In Study 2, credibility determinations of university students enrolled in computer science courses were examined for 3 provided Web sites dealing with the same computer science topic. Reasons for determining Web site inaccuracy included own expertise, information corroboration, information design and bias. As in Study 1, commercial vested interests were negatively regarded in contrast to educational interests. Instructional implications and suggestions for further research are discussed. Preliminary results from Study 1 were presented as a poster entitled “Users’ Confidence Levels and Strategies for Determining Web Site Veracity” (Iding et al. 2002a) and appeared in associated proceedings for The WWW 2002: The Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Preliminary results from Study 2 were presented as a paper entitled, “Judging the Veracity of Web Sites” (Crosby et al. 2002) and appeared in associated proceedings for the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2002) in Auckland, New Zealand.