Grateful for the recognition and the valuable feedback during the conference 🙌

Looking forward to completing the next phase of the study so that we can share the results with a wider audience.

#misinforesearch #textdiscourse #ChatGPT #evaluationstrategies #telekomstiftung #gradstudentaward

Special thanks to my supervisor @marcstadtler.bsky.social and Mykola Makhortykh for their collaboration as well as Deutsche Telekom Stiftung for supporting this research.

So, what does this mean?
🤖 AI tools like ChatGPT may assist with sourcing but they still fall short in critical information evaluation.

They cannot - and should not - replace human judgment in online reasoning.

ChatGPT outperformed human participants in source discernment but only when all relevant information was clearly available.

💡 It struggled when sources were less credible or information was not available in the materials.

In the study, we compared ChatGPT’s performance on sourcing and corroboration tasks with that of lower and upper secondary as well as teacher students.

Many thanks to my co-authors Sandra Aßmann, Carolin Baumgarten, and @marcstadtler.bsky.social.

Bottom line:
Teaching adolescents to sourcing and corroboration makes them more resilient to online misinformation—and the effects last.

If you’re serious about building digital resilience in the next generation, start here 👇

🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Also interesting: Higher reading proficiency = greater benefit from training

Our findings suggest that cultivating sourcing and corroboration may be more effective to counter misinformation than teaching how misinformation looks like, who spreads it, and how it unfolds its effects.

🕒 And it stuck.
Four weeks after the training, gains in:
- Source evaluation ✅
- Debunking social media misinformation ✅
…remained stable.

Metastrategic knowledge decreased a bit—but core skills held strong.

Strategy-trained students:
✅ Identified credible sources more accurately
✅ Debunked misinformation using corroboration
✅ Gained metastrategic knowledge of sourcing and corroboration, improving in when and how to apply the strategies

In our study, 210 seventh- and eighth-graders received either:
1) Strategy training (sourcing + corroboration)
2) Control training (knowledge about misinformation)

Guess who got better at evaluating online sources and social media misinformation? 👀

Das Pferd ist ein Sieger. Setz alles auf Horst!

Horst 🐎

We conclude: By fostering a deep understanding and practical application of evaluation strategies (in particular sourcing and corroboration) students can be better equipped to make informed decisions about whom to trust and what to believe in digital environments.

The findings indicate that teachers were able to implement the provided training program and achieve some notable improvements in their students‘ learning outcomes in the short- and midterm.

Contrary to the hypotheses, the training did neither improve
performance in corroborating deepfake and genuine videos, nor did it reduce metastrategic knowledge about
utilizing superficial appearance evaluation strategies for identifying deepfakes.