Disinformation and fake news: assessment of higher education students' skills

Abstract

Introduction: The present study aimed to identify the perception of first and fourth-year students in the undergraduate course of Library and Information Science at the Federal University of S & atilde;o Carlos regarding the evaluation of content related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: Five news articles were selected, classified according to news fact-checking platforms as the most shared in May 2020, and presented to the students in the form of an online quiz. The quiz involved a total of 32 participants, with 19 from the first year and 13 from the fourth year of the course, and the students were required to classify the news as true or false based on their knowledge of news evaluation and fact-checking. The news articles were presented to the students without spelling or grammar corrections. Results: After analyzing the results, we found that 78.93% of first-year students and 100% of fourth-year students correctly marked at least three out of the five news articles presented. Therefore, when comparing first-year students with fourth-year students, we concluded that fourth-year students have a greater understanding of correctly evaluating misinformation, as expected. Conclusions: The results obtained with fourth-year students suggest that their longer time in the university possibly led to the more advanced development of information literacy and digital competence skills.