The growing volume of information circulating in digital environments has intensified doubts about its reliability, as in many cases the available content contradicts itself or presents false information. Examples of this include topics such as food, health, and the environment.
In this context, training well-founded opinions and developing critical thinking has become a significant challenge, particularly for university students, who constantly rely on the internet to support their learning during their professional training.
With the goal of understanding this phenomenon, the Literature and Language Sciences Institute (ILCL for its name in Spanish) is carrying out an investigation led by Professor Fernando Moncada, in the context of a Regular Fondecyt Project titled “Knowledge revision on the internet: offline and online effects of individual, textual and contextual variables in university students”.
The main goal of this work is to study "knowledge revision", that is, the process by which a person reviews and corrects a mistaken belief when confronted with correct information that contradicts it. "We want to understand what factors make this process more or less successful; in other words, why some people manage to correct a misconception when reading online and others do not", the researcher explained.
According to professor Moncada this ability is not always developed in a systematic way, since people tend to search and accept information that confirms their previous beliefs and makes it difficult to question one’s own ideas. “To correct a mistaken belief is not something that occurs automatically. Even in the face of contradicting evidence, this idea can stay active in our memory and continue to influence decision-making. This is why it is important to study this process because we know that there are conditions that favor it and can be improved”, he explained.
The scholar added that this phenomenon is accentuated in the digital environment, as reliable information coexists with misleading content that often presents a similar appearance of credibility. In addition, students must not only understand what they read, but also navigate through different types of content and evaluate their credibility. In this regard, he stated that a key factor must be added for the university setting: students are building the conceptual frameworks they will use in their professional lives, so holding onto erroneous ideas can have long-term consequences.
The study aims to identify which combinations of factors—related to the texts, the reading context, and the reader's characteristics—facilitate or hinder knowledge revision, factors that have largely been studied separately until now. "By combining what happens during reading with how beliefs change afterward, we hope to distinguish not only whether a revision of that misconception occurred, but also how it develops as the person reads and whether it persists over time", she stated.
Results
This project is one of the first to address the “knowledge revision” phenomenon in chilean university students’ digital reading, a population that has characteristics that are not always represented on international investigations.
In this regard, the researcher explained that the results aim to contribute both to theoretical development and to the creation of educational applications tailored to the national context, which can serve as input for the design of more effective educational strategies. He added that "knowledge revision" is not a fixed ability, but rather one that can be developed through education. For example, by working with texts that explicitly explain why certain ideas are incorrect, by fostering the critical evaluation of sources, or by promoting more demanding reading objectives where students have to argue or justify their position, especially in online reading contexts.
The research team led by Fernando Moncada is also formed by other three scholars from the Literature and Language Sciences Institute at the PUCV: Romualdo Ibáñez, Andrea Santana and Cristóbal Julio. In addition, thesis students from the Applied Linguistics Master’s program and the Linguistics Doctoral Program from the university are part of the project.
By Jenny Díaz
Strategic Communications Department
