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In an era where digital and media literacy is as fundamental as reading, writing, and arithmetic, the role of school librarians transcends traditional boundaries. They are the perfect teachers to nurture digital citizenship among learners, an increasingly vital role. This article delves into how these unsung heroes and digital leaders use their digital superpowers to guide young minds toward safe, savvy, and socially responsible digital interactions. These superpowers are also directly aligned with the American Association of School Librarians Standards for Learners (2018) shared foundations: inquire, include, collaborate, curate, explore, and engage, which are easily crosswalked with the International Society for Technology in Education Standards for Students (BrooksYoung 2016).

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess health insurance acquisition awareness, knowledge, and associated emotions among college students preparing to enter the workforce. Methods: A 21-item survey was developed to gather data on knowledge, awareness, and emotions associated with health insurance acquisition conversations with future employers. Results: Most respondents (91.1%), indicated they have thought about obtaining their own health insurance. The study found that participants rated acquiring health insurance more important the closer the respondent was to graduation; F[subscript 4,96] = 3.84, p = 0.006. An increase in stress emotions was indicated (F[subscript 4,96] =14.41, p = 0.000) and a reduction in positive emotions (F[subscript 4,96] = 2.99, p = 0.035) regarding health insurance acquisition post-graduation. Conclusions: College students identify low knowledge and indicate high levels of stress regarding health insurance conversations with future employers post-graduation. These findings are important for developing self-efficacy-based health education content preparing students for engaging in these conversations confidently and effectively.

In a rapidly changing information landscape, science communicators need to find new ways to engage audiences, make their information memorable and increase attitudes towards scientists. Evidence suggests that stories could be an effective tool for these goals, but few studies tested experimentally whether they are advantageous to non-stories in the context of science communication. The current study aimed to fill that gap. Participants fluent in German (n = 151) were randomly assigned to either read a scientific text written as a story or written in classic abstract format. It was hypothesized that participants reading the story would score higher on reading enjoyment, attention focus, emotional engagement, topic interest, perceived authenticity of the author, identification and information recall than participants reading the non-story. Results showed that participants who read a story felt a higher sense of connection towards the author, a subconstruct of authenticity, while other variables remained insignificant. Reasons why this study could only find limited proof for the effectiveness of stories in science communication and methodological implications for future research are discussed.

In today's knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evidence-based decision-making, our aim was to better understand how adults engage with scientific information in everyday life. First, we used a data-driven exploratory approach to identify four latent factors in a large set of measures related to cognitive skills and epistemic attitudes. The resulting structure suggests that key factors include curiosity and positive attitudes toward science, prosociality, cognitive skills, and openmindedness to new information. Second, we investigated whether these factors predicted behavior in a naturalistic decision-making task. In the task, participants were introduced to a real science-related petition and were asked to read six online articles related to the petition, which varied in scientific quality, while deciding how to vote. We demonstrate that curiosity and positive science attitudes, cognitive flexibility, prosociality and emotional states, were related to engaging with information and discernment of evidence reliability. We further found that that social authority is a powerful cue for source credibility, even above the actual quality and relevance of the sources. Our results highlight that individual motivating factors toward information engagement, like curiosity, and social factors such as social authority are important drivers of how adults judge the credibility of everyday sources of scientific information.

Objective: To explore experiences, beliefs, and information-seeking behavior around COVID-19 among college students in Oklahoma. Participants: Fifteen college students participated during the pandemic period from April to July 2020. Methods: An exploratory, qualitative research approach method was used to discover students' experiences, beliefs, and information-seeking behaviors around COVID-19. Exploration of beliefs was guided by the Health Belief Model. Results: Students engaged in COVID-19 information-seeking behaviors predominantly through Internet sites, broadcast news, health professionals, and governmental sources. Students experienced emotional burden as a result of COVID-19 misinformation in these sources. While most students perceived a low chance of acquiring the virus due to their lack of underlying medical conditions, they were still concerned about the consequences of becoming infected. Students noted the difficulty of physical distancing while on campus. Conclusions: Colleges/universities should maximize the dissemination of timely, valid health information for the safety of their students and the broader community.

Faced with myriad societal norms, children must decide which norms to accept and which to reject. These decisions hold consequences for how norms change over time. Decisions about norms are particularly salient for religious children in pluralistic societies, who encounter norms both from their own as well as from other religious and non-religious communities. Although children follow norms and disapprove of their violation from early in life, this should not be taken to mean that children "approve" of the norms themselves: a person can disapprove of a norm that they follow and enforce upon others. The present study examined religious children's views about the authorship, utility, changeability, and changeworthiness of norms. Ninety-seven Hindu and Muslim 9- to 14-year-olds (46 female and 51 male) in India were interviewed about familiar religious, moral, and conventional norms. As predicted, children's views about whether a norm should be changed (its "changeworthiness") were predicted by how good they perceived the norm to be (its "utility"). Also as hypothesized, children's views about who, if anyone, could change a norm (its "changeability") was predicted by their views about who made the norm (its "authorship"). Children distinguished between norms based on their perceived authorship, utility, changeability, and changeworthiness. Age and religious differences also emerged. Together, these findings elucidate how children come to accept or reject norms, which ultimately affects how norms persist, change, or disappear over time.

Adolescent internet usage is incredibly prevalent, marking a need for educational support as they navigate online texts. As online texts are prone to bias and misinformation, it is important to fully understand how young people conceptualize this information and where they need support. These texts may also contain harmful messages, particularly for typically marginalized groups. Higher levels of literacies related to online media consumption have been shown to mitigate these negative effects, and may help to limit bias and increase criticality. Researchers have illuminated underlying processes surrounding online text comprehension, though research is limited on these processes in authentic spaces. Utilizing think-aloud, focus group, and observational data, the present study seeks to understand adolescent online research and information-seeking skills, providing implications for literacy educators and curriculum developers.

This paper focuses on finding the criteria adopted by users to select free information retrieved from the Web for academic use. A close-ended questionnaire was formulated to record the opinions of the respondents. A survey for various categories of users such as post graduate students, research scholars and faculty members from five universities of Chandigarh, Haryana, and Punjab was administered. The category-wise and discipline-wise analysis depicted that quite a good number of respondents applied various parameters while referring to Web resources, but a reasonable number of users did not apply certain parameters to verify the nature of free information being used for educational purposes. The convenience factor leads them to depend on free Web resources which can be accessed anywhere and saves time. The findings of the study suggest that user education programs should be conducted to create awareness regarding the credibility of the subscribed library resources and their effectiveness in enhancing the quality of teaching, learning, and research.

The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of the Spanish-speaking Latino community during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. A single remote focus group meeting was conducted with nine Spanish-speaking participants to explore how residents living amidst shelter-in-place orders made informed decisions about health, safety, and security during the early months of the pandemic. The focus group meeting lasted about 60-90 minutes, and this meeting was facilitated by bilingual/bicultural Latino research assistants trained in qualitative research methods. Study participants also completed the Household Pulse Survey developed by the U.S. Census Bureau, a 20-minute survey to understand the social, health, and economic impact of COVID-19. The mean age was 33 years [range 21-60, SD = 12.44], and most participants attended some or completed a college degree. The participants self-reported as heterosexual, and five self-reported as single or never married. At least four noted making less than $25,000 annually, and four reported that they were self-employed. Most of the participants resided in New Jersey (n = 6), whereas two were from Michigan and one was from New York. The themes that emerged from the focus group meeting were the following: (1) social media and televised news outlets propagated confusing and harmful public messages; (2) COVID-19 elicited negative feelings of uncertainty; and (3) participants had widespread concerns about the health of their family, others, and self. Public messages on COVID-19 were not only confusing but harmful, as Latino families were highly dependent on them when determining how to protect their families in the early days of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of a multifaceted public health approach. Promoting health literacy and safe behaviour to reduce disease spread can be an effective social vaccine. However, the role of science teachers as part of a social vaccine is unclear. Similarly, their responses to health crises and the factors affecting such responses are poorly understood. We investigated the relationship between the COVID-19 vaccination status and the reliance on different sources of information among pre-service science teachers from South African and Indonesian universities as a preliminary effort to understand the role that teachers could play in promoting health literacy and safe behavioural practices. We conducted a survey using a comparative quantitative approach to gather data from 87 South African and 93 Indonesian pre-service science teachers through a closed-ended questionnaire. Different statistical tests were performed using SPSS to analyse the data, including the Mann-Whitney U test, Levene's test for equality of variance, t-test, regression analysis and analysis of variance. The results show that South African pre-service science teachers reported a lower COVID-19 vaccine uptake than Indonesians. Both sets of participants rely on social media, research articles, textbooks and friends and family to learn about COVID-19. However, reliance on these sources is not significantly associated with vaccination status. We conclude that contextual factors may affect vaccination status. We recommend further research into science teachers' role in promoting health literacy and safe behavioural practices to reduce the spread of diseases. We also recommend using social media to share scientific information for health education.

Sexual health education should meet the needs of all students. One strategy educators can use to ensure instruction meets students' needs is to encourage the submission of anonymous questions, allowing students to gain information without fear of instructor or peer reactions. We investigated anonymous questions submitted by middle school (7th-grade, ages 12-13) students during a sexual health education curriculum in Ohio, USA. Questions (n=893) were organised into 12 categories: reproductive anatomy (n=186), LGBTQ+ topics (n=130), sexual behaviour (n=120), class-related questions (n=99), pregnancy (n=78), slang (n=52), STIs (n=44), protection/birth control (n=33), relationships (n=19), consent (n=14), health services (n=9), abstinence (n=1), and unrelated questions/comments (n=108). After categorising questions, we conducted thematic analysis with the three largest categories (reproductive anatomy, LGBTQ+ topics, sexual behaviour). Results revealed students wanted to know about the normality of the processes and functions of their bodies. Students also expressed concern and had internalised social norms about LGBTQ+ topics. Student questions about sexual behaviour suggested they wanted to learn more about the purposes and processes of sex, e.g., how people have intercourse. Findings underscore the need for inclusive, comprehensive and medically accurate sexual health education for early adolescents. We discuss implications for student health/well-being, educator development, and school staff.

Sourcing information related to socio-scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the secondary and tertiary years, often taking an epistemic approach to analysis, rather than a literacies lens. At the heart of such endeavours, however, is the need for sophisticated reading skills accelerated by shifts to digital platforms to source information. Given the limited empirical studies in the field of literacy that articulate how middle school students approach sources of information, this study investigates 45 middle school students' (13-14 years of age) self-reported strategies for investigating health risks associated with mobile phone use. We asked the students to imagine that a close friend was worried about the health risks of using their mobile phone and had asked them for advice. Students were then prompted to describe how they would search for information about the issue and how they would know if the information was reliable. Our analysis identified three dominant themes in the interview data, namely: (i) mistrust of the internet--people can be reliable sources; (ii) reliable sourcing requires consensus across sources; and (iii) criteria help to determine a reliable source. An interesting finding was the level of scepticism of the internet expressed by students. We draw on examples from the students' interview dialogue to illustrate the themes and engage in discourse related to their approaches including implications for teaching in English classrooms.

Presenting pictures of faces side by side is a common paradigm to assess infants' attentional biases according to social categories, such as gender, race, and language. However, seeing static faces does not represent infants' typical experience of the social world, which involves people in motion and performing actions. Here, we assessed infants' looking preferences for native over foreign language speakers in two social contexts: the presentation of static faces and the presentation of people performing instrumental actions. In addition, we tested infants' preferential looking at 5 and 9 months of age to assess whether their pattern of preferential looking changes across development. The results of 5-month-old infants replicated and extended previous findings by showing that, at this age, infants typically look longer at people who previously spoke their native language. As found for other social categories such as race and gender, this familiarity-based looking preference was not evident at 9 months of age when infants were presented with static faces. However, when presented with more informative dynamic events, 9-month-old infants showed a temporally aligned preference for the native over the foreign language speaker. Specifically, infants' looking preference was time-locked to the completion of the action goal: when speakers grasped and lifted a toy. These results suggest potentially a familiarity-based preference toward native language speakers around 5 months of age, which may later develop into a more strategic selective response in service of information-seeking.

Undergraduate students entering the classroom are often expected to have the skills needed to find, utilize, and synthesize academic scholarship. Yet, few feel prepared to do so. The research methods classroom provides immense opportunities for developing a meaningful foundation for students to enhance information literacy such that they feel comfortable and confident using peer-reviewed scholarship. In this activity, students collaborate to engage with peers to access institutional databases, explore empirical articles, practice citation skills, and ask questions about the process of engaging in meaningful research. Courses: Social science/communication research methods, introductory courses that require peer-reviewed sources, undergraduate capstones, Communication Theory. Objectives: Students will: (1) gain hands-on tools for and experience with locating, searching for, and understanding content within peer-reviewed empirical articles from online databases; (2) engage in group collaboration to demystify the search for and use of scholarly article content in and beyond the research methods course; and (3) develop working relationships with peers to facilitate a positive, engaging, and supportive classroom climate early in the semester.

Background: American Psychological Association Guidelines for Undergraduate Education (2013) encourage workforce preparation among undergraduate students, and the field of psychology has implemented this recommendation in various ways. Objective: The present study investigated what sources undergraduate psychology students use to find information about and experiences they seek in preparation for their future careers, and what characteristics are associated with this process. Method: Undergraduate participants (N = 354) described the number and type of sources from which they sought information and experiences on careers, and also provided demographic information (e.g., academic achievement). Results: Participants primarily used the Internet, advice from friends/family, and a career orientation course to find information, with higher academic achievement predicting the use of more sources. They sought a variety of experiences to enhance career opportunities (e.g., volunteering), with academic achievement and class standing as positive predictors of seeking more of such experiences. Conclusion: To maximize students' success, psychology departments should show students everything that the department and university have to offer by way of career information and preparation. Implications: Departments should encourage students to use resources within the psychology department, include career information in orientation courses, in addition to regularly encouraging familiarity with on campus career centers.

What drives children to explore and learn when external rewards are uncertain or absent? Across three studies, we tested whether information gain itself acts as an internal reward and suffices to motivate children's actions. We measured 24-56-month-olds' persistence in a game where they had to search for an object (animal or toy), which they never find, hidden behind a series of doors, manipulating the degree of uncertainty about "which specific object" was hidden. We found that children were more persistent in their search when there was higher uncertainty, and therefore, more information to be gained with each action, highlighting the importance of research on artificial intelligence to invest in curiosity-driven algorithms.

This study examines four learner engagement dimensions (behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social) in pedagogical task performance and provides insights into the effects of two task types (information-seeking and direction-giving) and topic familiarity on learner engagement in a semester-long English course. A total of 28 foreign language learners engaged in eight interactive tasks, and all played the roles of both information-receiver and information-provider alternately under familiar and unfamiliar conditions. Seven measures of engagement and an open-ended questionnaire were employed to understand the learners' engagement in the tasks and their emotional responses to them. The results revealed that the information-providers produced more words and also spent more time on information-seeking tasks wherein they would exchange information than on direction-giving ones that required them to ask for and provide instructions or directions. This was the case for topics they were unfamiliar with; however, when they were faced with familiar topics, they produced significantly more words, spent more time, and spoke more elaboratively in direction-giving tasks. The information-seeking tasks elicited positive emotions, but the direction-giving tasks yielded mixed feelings, attaching positive emotions to familiar tasks but negative ones to unfamiliar tasks. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.

Youth are vulnerable to mental health challenges. Social media presents an opportunity to evaluate disinhibited mental health discourse and self-disclosure. The objective of this study was to explore reported experiences and information needs related to youth seeking support for mental health on the social media platform, Reddit.com. We searched two subreddits: r/mental health and r/teenagers on Reddit.com for posts made by youth (13-24 years) relating to mental health help-seeking behaviors and information needs. Posts were screened and relevant data were extracted, coded, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Thematic analysis of relevant posts yielded four themes: (1) navigating mental health issues, (2) disclosing to others, (3) barriers to seeking care, and (4) experiences seeking care. Youth may have a diverse range of mental health help-seeking-related information needs and may face several barriers throughout the process of seeking care.

The gap in knowledge and information-seeking between high and low socioeconomic status (SES) has been well documented. This study extends this knowledge gap hypothesis to narrative persuasion in the context of parents' knowledge and information-seeking intention concerning adolescents' COVID-19 vaccination. It specifically tests if the gap is moderated by a message type (narrative vs. non-narrative). An online quasi-experiment, with a 2 (participants' education level: high vs. low) × 3 (message type: narrative vs. non-narrative vs. no-message) between-subject design, showed a main effect of education level (i.e., parents with a higher [vs. lower] education level rated a higher intention to seek information and provided more correct answers on questions about adolescents' COVID-19 vaccination) and an interaction between the two factors. The interaction showed that the gap between high- and low-education groups in information-seeking intention disappeared among those who read the narrative or non-narrative, and the gap in knowledge disappeared among those who read the narrative. Study findings suggest the utility of narratives in narrowing the gap in knowledge and information-seeking to improve parents' decisions on child vaccination.

This study explores the career information-seeking behaviours of young people and career advisers. These are examined through the interrogation of a secondary data set held by Scotland's national skills agency, Skills Development Scotland. Descriptive and frequency analyses of engagement records from career conversations reveal three key characteristics of information seeking in career advisory settings: prompted information seeking; information seeking on young people's behalf and collaborative information seeking. The original contribution of this study lies in two novel research foci: (a) the identification of distinct patterns of career information-seeking behaviours and colloquial language which signifies that information seeking has taken place and (b) the consideration of young people and career advisers' collaborative information seeking behaviours and their roles and functions within the career information-seeking process. These findings have implications for the improvement of career services and the development of career information, advice and guidance (CIAG) policies.

This paper explores teachers' conceptions of climate change knowledge, contributing to the growing body of work on the geographies of climate change. The paper focuses on the data generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews with a sample of 48 teachers in India to address the research question: What discourses about climate change knowledge are being constructed by teachers in India? We argue that teachers' lesson planning and searches for information are at the forefront of the changing ways in which individuals engage with, find out and construct meaning about climate change. These teachers' beliefs about climate change are very strongly held, even in the face of a perceived lack of expertise or understanding: climate change is described as the 'need of the hour', which this work understands as not only involving material impacts and processes but also important epistemological, collaborative needs through which education might contribute to public reasoning about climate change. Through this analysis we present a 'certainty problematic' as a heuristic device that foregrounds tensions between the inherent uncertainty of knowledge and (against climate denialism) certainty about anthropogenic climate change.

Wayfinding, which is a part of learning in connectivist learning, involves consolidating a wide variety of resources and information and building connections among them. However, learners often encounter difficulties in wayfinding, and are lost without technological support in connectivist learning. This study examined the wayfinding processes occurring within a network of learners in a personal social knowledge network (PSKN), explored differences in behavior patterns between high and low performers in PSKN. The results reveal the diversity and complexity of wayfinding in a PSKN, including finding and connecting nodes, forming cognitive maps, finding and filtering information, and creating new nodes. Moreover, the characteristics of wayfinding in the PSKN differed across participants, and high- and low-performing participants demonstrated different and unique wayfinding behavioral patterns, which provided a basis for comprehensive analyses of wayfinding. These findings can be used to provide instructional support and network navigation in connectivist learning for learners at various performance levels. The proposed PSKN shows promise in facilitate wayfinding including finding nodes and connecting nodes, as well as relations between knowledge nodes and the course base demonstrated by PSKN, providing great convenience for learners to form cognitive maps based on the node sequence. Compared with current studies, this research focuses on diversified interaction data and resource behavior rather than teaching videos and quizzes or exercises as the main resources and considering that course and technological factors influence the ways in which learners access resources in connectivist learning.

Information literacy (IL) is generally accepted as an important learning competency in undergraduate education and is directly and indirectly mentioned in many national accrediting bodies' standards. While information literacy has been seen as the sole domain of librarians, research shows that disciplinary faculty believe it is important and teach it in their classes. This study reports the findings from a survey conducted at California State University, Los Angeles on faculty's information literacy teaching practices. The results show that faculty take responsibility for teaching all areas of information literacy and do so in a variety of ways.

Objective: This study aimed to understand students' ability to search the Internet for COVID-19 information and apply it to evaluate the veracity of specific statements. Participants: Undergraduate students (N = 239) at a US university completed a Web-based questionnaire in September--October 2020. Methods: The questionnaire included self-reported measures of online health information literacy, COVID-19 knowledge, and anxiety along with exercises on searching and evaluating COVID information online. Results: Students reported moderate levels of information literacy (76%, 3.8 out of 5), but did not perform as well while searching the Internet for COVID-19 information (average accuracy: 65%, 10.5 out of 16 points). Students with higher Internet exercise scores reported higher GPA, higher household income, and liberal political views, and were more likely to follow public health measures [ie, social distancing, mask wearing, and not self-medicating with (hydroxy)chloroquine]. Conclusions: University students may overestimate their information literacy while struggling with searching the Internet for accurate COVID-19 information.

Early career teachers experience numerous challenges during their transition into the profession. Reddit is a social media platform that allows users to gather around shared affinity while remaining anonymous. This study explores how early career teachers participate in the r/Teachers subreddit through posts tagged as "New Teacher" content. Hand-coding of 2,445 posts created in 2021 showed that early career teachers primarily seek information and advice but also share personal stories. Early career teachers' reasons for posting varied according to their background characteristics. This research has implications for using an anonymous online affinity space for early career teachers' preparation and professional development.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surfeit of information and misinformation in the media about it. The lockdown in England meant that schools were closed from March to June, meaning that students had limited access, in school, to ask questions and discuss the biology of the novel virus (SARS-CoV-2) or the impact of the pandemic on themselves, their families and friends. In this small-scale exploratory study, we decided to ask students (15- to 16-year-olds) on their return to school in June 2020 and in September 2020, what they wanted to know about COVID-19. Findings show that their questions were similar at both time points, indicating that students wanted to know the same things. This suggests that despite the high volume of information available in the media, some of the students' questions had not been answered or that sources of information were confused and at times contradictory. Interestingly, the questions they asked were based on reliable sources of news rather than fake news, and this finding seems to contradict the literature that indicates young people are prone to believing misinformation. The implications for teaching and learning about COVID-19, and other zoonotic diseases as socio-scientific issues are discussed.

This study aims to explore the experiences of breastfeeding mothers during pregnancy in tandem breastfeeding. This research is a qualitative study conducted using the phenomenological research design. Data saturation was achieved after 11 participants were interviewed. The content analysis approach was used to analyze the data. Interview transcriptions were systematically examined, and the study findings were gathered under 4 main themes within the framework of tandem breastfeeding from the perspective of breastfeeding women. These main themes consist of decision to continue tandem breastfeeding, tandem information support/search, maternal experience in tandem breastfeeding, and recommendations for mothers. The participants mostly shared their experiences in the effects of tandem breastfeeding on child health, pregnancy, and breast milk. Both mothers' own beliefs and feelings and community beliefs affected their decision to continue tandem breastfeeding. Mothers who tandem breastfed in this study need information and support.

Researchers and practitioners have long been interested in the role of learner agency in the emergence of learning opportunities. However, despite the growing number of studies, few of them have empirically been able to demonstrate how such moments can create learning opportunities. Based on 12 hours of videotaped data, this study describes the nature of learner initiatives in L2 oral communication classroom interaction and brings evidence for the emergence of situated cognition and learning. An in-depth conversation-analytic investigation of learner-initiated vocabulary explanation sequences reveals three types of sequences which include: (1) clarification request + vocabulary explanation and no claim/display of understanding format; (2) clarification request + vocabulary explanation and claim of understanding format, and (3) clarification request + vocabulary explanation and display of understanding format. The findings of this study contribute to the existing research on learner initiatives in instructed learning settings and language learning with a micro-analytic account of verbal and non-verbal aspects of situated cognition and learning emerging in L2 oral communication classroom interaction.

Feedback is identified in the works of researchers as an essential element for improving the learning process of students. Research shows that lecturer's feedback creates value when it provides not only appraisal information but also links to further learning. This type of feedback affects the learner's information behaviour, i.e., encourages searching for additional information and using it in the learning process. The paper aims to analyze the peculiarities of students' information behaviour during feedback. The research object is investigated from an information science perspective, using theories of information behaviour. An exploratory quantitative survey of 111 Communication BA students from Vilnius University, Lithuania, was conducted. The results of the study revealed the characteristics of feedback inspired by information behaviour: the feedback provided by the lecture is the primary source of information; feedback promotes individual information search; timely feedback encourages proactive information behaviour.

Historical reasoning, as a disciplinary literacy, aims to develop higher-order thinking in addition to depth of historical knowledge beyond the textbook and memorization of facts. It teaches students to use information across multiple sources to contextualize and corroborate historical accounts, constructing an informed yet critical interpretation of events. Studies on the use of multiple sources to develop historical reasoning among students with learning differences (ld) are scarce. This qualitative study seeks to explore and describe how twelve 7th grade students in a special education classroom used multiple historical sources when writing argumentative/expository essays. The 96 total essays that students wrote throughout the academic year are the primary data source for this paper. Data memos, lesson plans, and interview transcripts were used to triangulate the findings found in the essays. Based on a thematic analysis, three major themes emerged: (1) students with ld demonstrated discipline-specific cognitive processes (e.g., sourcing, corroboration, contextualization) when using multiple historical sources in their essays; (2) students with ld leveraged the use of multiple historical sources in writing essays, mediated by a range of interests toward multiple source use; and (3) high-quality instruction characterized by scaffolding (i.e., gradual release of responsibility) for reading and writing fostered students with ld's understanding of historical events and historical reasoning using multiple sources. This paper offers implications for policy, research, and practice related to multiple source use among students with ld.

This study shows how learner initiatives are taken during classroom discussions where the teacher seeks to make room for subjectification. Using Conversation Analysis, subjectification can be observed when students take the freedom to express themselves as subjects through learner initiatives. Drawing on data from classroom discussions in language and literature lessons in the mother tongue, the authors find that learner initiatives can be observed in three different ways: "agreement, request for information, counter-response." A learner initiative in the form of an agreement appears to function mostly as a continuer and prompts the previous speaker to reclaim the turn, while the I-R-F structure remains visible. In contrast, making a "request for information" or giving a "counter-response" ensures mostly a breakthrough of the I-R-F-structure and leads to a dialogical participation framework in which multiple students participate. Findings illustrate that by making a "request for information" or giving a counter-response, students not only act as an independent individual, but also encourage his peers to do so.

The present study aims to develop, validate, and cross-validate an instrument measuring three proactive social informal learning activities, namely feedback seeking, help seeking and information seeking. Prior research mainly focused on detecting or measuring the frequency of these seeking behaviours and did not consider whether the information, help or feedback that has been sought was also used. Furthermore, although these seeking behaviours were studied extensively in different research fields, the current study takes a learning perspective and interprets feedback, help and information seeking as learning activities. The questionnaire was completed by a convenient sample of 650 professionals working in higher education, consultancy, retail and food production. We performed an exploratory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to explore the structure of the questionnaire. This was followed by a confirmatory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to confirm the structure. Finally, we cross-validated the questionnaire in a sample of business professionals (N = 190) by testing for measurement invariance. The final questionnaire resulted in a five-factor structure measuring the (1) Use of Feedback Seeking, (2) Frequency of Help and Information Seeking, (3) Use of Help seeking, (4) Use of Information Seeking and (5) Frequency of Feedback Seeking. The current study presents a preliminary, yet promising instrument that taps into proactive social informal learning.

As part of a research study to examine first-year college students' preparation for college-level research, students at six U.S. institutions of higher education were surveyed in the spring semester of 2021. The pandemic continued to affect the delivery of information literacy (IL) instruction and library services across the United States throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. When students completed this survey in April and May of 2021, the majority of instructional services were offered in synchronous and asynchronous remote formats. The students' engagement with librarians and librarian-created instructional resources were captured via the survey and analysed to determine whether students were able to leverage these interactions and materials despite the remote contexts. Students who did not interact with an academic librarian were less likely to use library resources, had more problems accessing information, and felt more overwhelmed by the quantity of resources and services offered by the library. Results show that intentional student-librarian interactions are a bridge to the acquisition and development of knowledge practices and dispositions of the ACRL "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education." The findings suggest considerations for moving forward when it comes to communicating with students and delivering IL support in academic libraries around the world as countries emerge from pandemic conditions.

Digital literacy training programs (DLTPs) are influential in developing digital skills to help build a more inclusive and participatory ecosystem. This study reviews 86 studies related to DLTPs for marginalised populations in developed and developing countries. It aims to understand (a) the profile of DLTPs, (b) the digital competences incorporated in the training curriculum and (c) tangible outcomes of Internet use post-training. The review indicated that developed countries focus more on developing digital literacy in elderly populations. In contrast, the focus still lies on developing digital literacy among people with low skills and education levels in developing countries. The training curricula focus mainly on developing information-seeking and communication competencies, besides the basic operations of digital devices. Most of the studies reported an increase in the personal-level outcomes around health, leisure and self-actualisation achieved post-training. This study can help policymakers, practitioners, and educational researchers improve the scope and quality of educational programs and contribute to people's digital empowerment and well-being.

This study investigated 8- to 14-year-old U.S. children's (N = 202, 47% girls, and 49% White) evaluations of statements reflecting individual and structural attributions for the causes of racial inequality between Black and White people in the United States, the epistemic characteristics they used to seek out more information on this topic, and who they believed reflected these characteristics. With age, participants increasingly endorsed statements reflecting structural attributions for racial inequality (i.e., educational and occupational exclusion), and increasingly reasoned about privilege and racism. In contrast, participants did not endorse statements reflecting individual attributions at any age (i.e., group differences in intelligence and effort), instead reasoning about equality between racial groups. Overall, participants sought expertise (i.e., content knowledge) and interpersonal trust (i.e., closeness and support) in a scenario where they could choose a discussion partner to learn more about racial inequality, and were most likely to seek out their family members, though some also sought out their friends, teachers, and the internet or social media. This study provides insights into who children see as relevant sources for learning about racial inequality and their reasons for trusting them.

Problem Addressed: To better understand the factors associated with family cancer history (FCH) information and cancer information seeking, we model the process an individual undergoes when assessing whether to gather FCH and seek cancer information and compare models by sociodemographics and family history of cancer. We used cross-sectional data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 5, Cycle 2) and variables (e.g., emotion and self-efficacy) associated with the Theory of Motivated Information Management to assess the process of FCH gathering and information seeking. We completed path analysis to assess the process of FCH gathering and stratified path models. Results: Those who felt they could lower their chances of getting cancer (emotion) were more confident in their ability to complete FCH on a medical form (self-efficacy; B = 0.11, p < 0.0001) and more likely to have discussed FCH with family members (B = 0.07, p < 0.0001). Those who were more confident in their ability to complete a summary of their family history on a medical form were more likely to have discussed FCH with family members (B = 0.34, p < 0.0001) and seek other health information (B = 0.24, p < 0.0001). Stratified models showed differences in this process by age, race/ ethnicity, and family history of cancer. Implications for Public Health Research and Practice: Tailoring outreach and education strategies to address differences in perceived ability to lower chances of getting cancer (emotion) and confidence in the ability to complete FCH (self-efficacy) could help encourage less engaged individuals to learn about their FCH and gather cancer information.

The internet constitutes an important platform for parents to find information. How online information searching is linked to parental self-efficacy (PSE)--defined as parents' perceptions about their abilities to have a positive impact on their children--is still unknown. This two-wave study examined cross-lagged associations between PSE and parents' online information searching, as well as the prospective effect of perceived information overload on PSE and online information searching. Moreover, we examined whether these associations differed depending on the online context (governmental-run or nongovernmental-run websites). We used a sample of 214 parents of children (equal number of boys and girls) <4 years (85% of the parents were mothers and 93% were born in Sweden), who completed an online survey twice, 1 year apart. The results showed that parents who felt more efficacious at T1 reported a decrease in online information searching over time. The frequency of parents online searching, however, did not predict changes in PSE. In addition, the effects of information overload depended on the type of websites parents used. Among parents who used both types of websites to search for information, higher information overload was linked with increases in information searching and decreases in PSE over time. The results suggest that perceptions of low self-efficacy and feelings of overload might motivate parents to use the internet more to search for information.

This study aims to better understand differences in the decision-making process behind study choices for higher education by investigating the presence of exploration profiles and then explore the explanatory base. To achieve this, we first identified different exploration profiles of students transitioning to higher education (n = 5660), and then investigated whether they were predicted by different student variables (i.e., learning strategies, gender, and educational track) and linked with different outcomes of the decision-making process (i.e., the amount of information acquired regarding higher education, decisional status, and commitment). A latent profile analysis identified three exploration profiles based on the decisional tasks of orientation, self-, broad, and in-depth exploration: passive (35%), moderately active (52%), and highly active explorers (13%). Students' learning strategies (regulation and processing strategies) were associated with these profiles. Students with more effective regulation and processing strategies were more likely to be highly active than passive or moderately active explorers. Female students and students from the technical track were more likely to be found in the highly active profile compared to the moderately active and the passive or moderately active profile, respectively. Finally, highly active explorers had the most favorable outcomes, measured by decisional status, commitment, and amount of information. Based on a substantial dataset, our findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the explanatory base of important differences in the study choice making process of students opting for higher education. This may ultimately lead to more fitting support for students in less beneficial profiles.

The Documentation and Information Department of all Libyan universities is working on developing the university's website to suit all users with their different experiences and ways of interacting, so it is necessary to test the ease of use of these sites. That is why the researcher seeks to evaluate and compare his performance of these sites and chose the order of work on the first six Libyan universities as stated in the global ranking of universities. Among the six criteria that show the common strengths and weaknesses of the six university websites. The results showed the success of most university websites in ensuring the continuity of communication with their servers, while most of them failed in the security aspect and their lack of maintaining continuous updates. [Paper presented at the Scientific Conference on Information Technology and Computer Science (Feb 2022).]

This predictive, cross-sectional study aimed to determine the metacognitive online reading and navigational strategies and their relation to the reading performance of Grade 11 HUMSS Students of Pedro T. Mendiola Sr. Memorial National High School. Furthermore, the study also investigated which factors of metacognitive online reading and navigational strategies significantly influence the respondents' reading performance. One hundred twenty-five (125) students selected through simple random sampling participated in the study. Data were gathered using a Google Form and reading fluency test. Descriptive Statistics such as weighted mean, Pearson-Product correlation, and regression analysis were used to interpret the data. The students' extent of the metacognitive online reading and navigational strategies is high, while the students' reading performance is instructional. The metacognitive online reading strategy is strongly related to reading performance. The navigational strategy is moderately related to reading performance. All indicators of metacognitive online learning strategy significantly predict reading performance. Only mixed overview as an indicator of navigational strategy significantly predicts the reading performance. Senior High school students who used metacognitive online reading navigational strategies had definite reading goals in mind and knew how to accomplish them. Students need teacher support at the instructional reading performance level. The metacognitive and navigational strategies significantly predict and influence the respondents' reading performance.

To meet the demands of the 21st century, adult learners must display a range of sophisticated strategies for dealing with the digital world. With the switch to online instruction over the last months this need is only greater. In this article, I describe specific activities I implement with adult learners in a math and science class to help them develop these essential abilities while also enhancing their learning toward the content outcomes.