A02: Development of Economics Students’ Domain-Specific Critical Online Reasoning (DOM-COR) Skills over the Course of Their Bachelor Studies and Key Factors Influencing DOM-COR

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Current research and practice uniformly show that today’s students of economics use the Internet as the main source of information for their studies. Students and lecturers rate the skills of searching for and evaluating online information as crucial for successfully studying economics. There is growing evidence that students often acquire subject-related misconceptions in Internet-based learning, resulting in a distorted understanding of economics. Current developments in economics and societal fields highlight that teaching critical online reasoning (COR) should be anchored more deeply in economics education to reduce the substantial deficits in corresponding skills among students and even graduates, as shown in recent studies. Today’s educators need valid assessments that capture students’ COR skills to be able to design effective programs that prepare students for competent (self-directed) learning using the Internet. Based on prior research, A02 defines domain-specific (DOM)-COR as the necessary skillset for using economics-related information from the Internet to derive warranted knowledge and reasoned decisions. The DOM-COR construct is modeled in accordance with the three facets: online information acquisition, critical information evaluation, reasoning with evidence, argumentation and synthesis. A02 aims to provide an objective and reliable assessment of students’ DOM-COR development that allows for valid test score interpretations and meets diagnostic and prognostic needs in and outside of university contexts. To validly assess DOM-COR skills, A02 uses scenario-based tasks, employing newly developed and validated performance assessments in two formats—the real Internet and Internet-like simulations, which immerse students in a realistic problem that they have to solve based on the freely available online resources that they increasingly use in their studies. The effects of curricula and learning opportunities on the development of DOM-COR skills and other key personal and contextual covariates that have not been researched thus far are longitudinally analyzed in A02. Based on a random sample of n=300 economics students, with n=300 social sciences students serving as a comparison group, A02 generates unique data and findings, (i) on the development of students’ DOM-COR in economics, (ii) on key personal and institutional covariates and (iii) on the relation to key learning outcomes. In this way, A02 provides a necessary basis for the conceptual development of instructional interventions to effectively foster DOM-COR (in the 2nd research phase). A02 provides data and findings that will be used in subsequent analyses in all research unit projects and beyond; e.g., analyses of the online information and learning materials, together with B-projects, allow for critical appraisals of fit, and professional integration of ‘real-world’ online sources into higher education to help to improve students’ learning outcomes and study success.