An article entitled ‘It Goes Around the World’ – Children’s Understanding of the Internet (Eskelä-Haapanen & Kiili, 2019) was published in the Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy and is freely available on the journal’s website. In the study, 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders (n = 30) were interviewed about the nature of the Internet and trustworthiness of online information. From all students, 43% expressed some doubt towards the trustworthiness of online information and were able to a justify their doubt. Some of these justifications were quite concrete but few children were able to provide quite sophisticated justifications.
The second article, “Investigating elementary school students with text-based reasoning with multiple online information resources” (Kiili, Bråten, Kullberg & Leppänen, 2020), is freely readable until 6.2.2020. In the study, sixth graders were asked to compose a short text on the basis of four online resources. Most students relied on copy-paste strategy. However, some students were able integrate ideas within and across the online resources and integrate textual information with the task context.