The WWWDOT Approach to Improving Students’ Critical Evaluation of Websites
“The WWWDOT Approach to Improving Students’ Critical Evaluation of Websites” by Drs. Shenglan Zhang, Nell K. Duke, and Laura M. Jimenez is an article in The Reading Teacher. The framework encourages students to think about at least six dimensions when evaluating a website: (1) Who wrote this and what credentials do they have? (2) Why was it written? (3) When was it written and updated? (4) Does this help meet my needs? (5) Organization of website; (6) To do list for the future. The authors argue that students need strategies to determine whether information they read on the Internet is trustworthy and up-to-date.
In this article, the authors describe the WWWDOT framework for teaching elementary school students to evaluate websites. The authors briefly describe a study of the WWWDOT framework and main study findings, and then describe the WWWDOT framework in great detail. This article is especially useful because there are relatively few studies that focus on teaching these skills in elementary schools.