Presented at LILAC 2017

1. Information discernment:
from theory to practice
Dr Geoff Walton, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan
University
Dr Jamie Barker, Associate Professor, Staffordshire University
Dr Martin Turner, Senior Lecturer, Staffordshire University
Matt Pointon, Senior Lecturer, Northumbria University

2. The plan
• The theory
– Educational research foundations
• Higher education
• Schools (EPQ – FE/6th form)
• The practice
• Practice beyond HE
– Our experiment
– Public engagement

3. Educational
Research
foundations• Old definition
– ‘the ability to use higher order thinking skills in order to
make sound and complex judgments regarding a range of
text-based materials’ (Walton & Hepworth, 2013, p55)
• New definition
• The ways in which people make judgements about
information (Walton, 2017 forthcoming)
• Furthermore, information discernment can be
disaggregated into levels of increasing complexity
which change depending on context (Hepworth &
Walton, 2009; Walton, 2013)

4. Levels of
information
discernment
ladder1. Don’t know or
don’t care how to
be discerning,
“When you first
go on a website
you don’t read all
the information.”
1
2
3
4
5
2. Expressed as level
of detail or effort, “I
have learnt to go into
more detail with my
work.”
3. Expressed by true/false
statements, “see whether it is
from a big company where it’s
very probably going to be
factual or […] someone’s own
personal website […] that’s less
formal”
4. Expressed as making
judgements, “[The e-
learning training] helped
[me] decide which
resources were reliable
and useful and why.”
5. Expressed as the relative
value of criteria for a given
purpose, “Some of them
initially are important like
reliability… obviously if you
are going to reference
something in an essay etc.
you need to know that the
source is reliable.”
We called these
higher levels 4 and 5
a ‘cognitive
questioning state’

5. Online
discourse
• Different context and task – slightly different
result
• When students commented on fellow
students written work as part of a peer review
exercise there was a noticeable difference in
the most sophisticated responses

6. Online peer
review
• “You have used references to support your points, […]
It would have been nice for you to include 2 other
themes also, such as the social benefits and
psychological benefits to show your knowledge, and
add in the negatives to give an argument!”
• “You have looked at both sides by including refernces
(sic) that oppose each other such as the reference
that stated there was no change and then another
reference that stated there was a change”.

7. 6th form/FE
level
• We devised a workshop for students where
they completed an activity to enable them to
think about evaluating information, we found
that students were…

8. Student views
• Noticing things like citations, now meant that
they now avoided ‘unreliable’ information
• One learner mused that they now realized
that not everything was ‘true’ and that this
made them look more closely at what they
used
• ‘Never thought about looking at a web page
and analysing it in that way before’

9. Teacher
remarks
• The school librarian:
– since the delivery of the workshop, students no longer,
‘passively accept what they see’.
• All staff interviewed:
– The most notable and consistent remark -students had
adopted a ‘questioning’ state when engaging with
information sources for example,
– ‘It got them [students] to question what their source was,
where it was from, how credible was the source’
– and students were, ’questioning the credibility of the
sources they used’
– Behaviour students had not exhibited before the workshop

10. Implications for
the profession?
• People’s ability to make judgements can be
increased with the right intervention
• We have a suggested intervention to facilitate
this
– An activity with accompanying assessment which
focusses on an issue or problem where students
are directed to consider both (or indeed all) sides
of the argument
– A draft rubric for marking progress – see handout.

11. Experimental
context
• Information discernment clearly enables
students to get a better grade and contribute
to coping in an academic context and reduces
uncertainty (even stress arguably)
• Could we apply this more widely and say that
it would assist in an increase in coping with
information (or mis-information) in a wider
context?
• Could this increased coping actually have a
physiological dimension?

12. The
experiment
• We will be using Finopres/Finometer
and eye-tracking hardware and
software to measure participants
reactions to a task involving viewing
information and completing a word
search
• Working hypothesis
• Individuals who exhibit high levels
of information discernment will
experience lower levels of stress
when exposed to mis-information
than those who have low levels of
information discernment
This ability to make
sense of information
may have a protective
effect on well-being

13. Process (1)
Accumulated
time
Process
Pre N/A Screening – for religiosity, beliefs, chronic stress, mental health. This
is done online prior to the lab.
1 Start Participant (P) meets confederate (Confed) outside lab. Can interact.
Confed should be neutrally dressed.
2 5 mins P and confed pick from a hat. P always gets selected for room A.
Confed in room B. P feels that this allocation is random.
3 15 mins P sits down, we attach Finometer. Start recording CV reactivity. P
completes pre-questionnaires.
4 25 mins Calibrate eye-tracking to laptop. Then P has 5 minutes to read the
information from iPad while we collect eye-tracking and CV data.
5 30 mins 5 minutes of CV baseline data collection.

14. Process (2)
Accu
mula
ted
time
Process
6 35
mins
P is then shown the confed’s religiosity answers (faked) – trying to
communicate to the P that the confed is (a) devoutly religious (high scores)
or (b) not religious (low scores). P told that they are to help confed
complete a word search to win a prize. P told that the confed has got half
way through the task, and they need to complete it. Then they think about
the task for 2 minutes. Then they complete some self-reports.
7 40
mins
P starts word-search. Their visual gaze is monitored during this. Then we
can see how they perform. They might sabotage.
8 Stop recording CV reactivity
9 P completes some post-questionnaires.
10 50
mins
Debrief

15. Example of an eye-tracking heat
map

16. Public
engagement
• Seeking funding from the Wellcome Trust
– Demonstration of the equipment used in the
experiment
– Raise the issue of evaluating information especially
the media through
• Touring exhibition
• Workshops
• Proposed locations in Manchester, Stoke,
Newcastle and London
• London location in partnership with the British
Psychological Society (BPS)

17. Information discernment:
from theory to practice
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!
ANY QUESTIONS?
Dr Geoff Walton, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan
University
Dr Jamie Barker, Associate Professor, Staffordshire University
Dr Martin Turner, Senior Lecturer, Staffordshire University
Matt Pointon, Senior Lecturer, Northumbria University