Marc Stadtler
Germany
marc.stadtler@uni-muenster.de
MC Substitute – WG1
Position Paper
In the proposed project, we argue that when readers possess low prior topic knowledge, in particular, scrutinizing source information (henceforth ‘sourcing’), such as the author, his or her credentials, affiliations, date and place of publication and so forth, may be a viable means to assess the validity of knowledge claims (Stadtler & Bromme, 2014). This, in turn, requires that readers possess declarative knowledge about how knowledge is produced and disseminated in an information society or about how search engines work. They furthermore, need procedural knowledge about how to put their declarative knowledge into action when it comes to evaluating source information. Finally, readers need knowledge about the conditions of sourcing in order to execute the reading strategy in a meaningful manner.