An instrument to assess sourcing skills in middle school students: preliminary analysis

Many studies have found that evaluating the trustworthiness and usefulness of document sources is an important skill in learning multiple texts. The purpose of the present study was to test with a preliminary exploratory factor analysis the construction of a sourcing assessment questionnaire and whether this was a predictive task to assess intertextual integration skills. A total of 165 adolescents attending middle school participated in the research (M-age [SD]= 11.95 [1.05]). Based on Potocki and colleagues’ task, participants completed a source knowledge inventory task. Then, to evaluate intertextual integration skills, a sentence verification task was used. Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to test the dimensionality of the scales; reliability was evaluated in terms of internal consistency and predictive validity was assessed considering intertextual integration as a criterion variable. The Source Knowledge Inventory shows a trifactorial structure that accounted for 50.76% of the total variance: (1) Source identification, (2) Authors competence and (3) Judgment on web site choice. Multiple linear regression results show that the model is statistically significant (R-square= .14; p