Students’, Graduates’ and Young Professionals’ Critical Use of Online Information

This book addresses the topic of online information for everyday personal and professional use by students, graduates, and young professionals. It focuses on the development of the job-related use of online information by young professionals in their practical phases of education (traineeship/practical year) in the domains of law, teaching, and medicine. The research conducted in this context investigates the general and domain-specific use of online resources in educational contexts and examines the effectiveness of an innovative digital training approach in enhancing skills required for the competent use of online information. For this purpose, the presented research uses a yet unprecedented approach of data triangulation, in which self-rated data, digitally and in vivo assessed response process data and expert ratings are integrated into a theoretically founded assessment framework and are examined from various interdisciplinary perspectives with different analysis methods. Overall, this work addresses key research questions related to the use of online information in practical tasks as well as to the impact of digital training. It provides in-depth multidisciplinary analyses of multimodal processes and performance data, allowing implications equally relevant for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field of education.