Students’, Graduates’ and Young Professionals’ Critical Use of Online Information: Digital Performance Assessment and Training Within and Across Domai

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.

Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia has been a Professor of Economics Education at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, since 2006 and has headed the BRIDGE project. She is a fellow of the International Academy of Education and has directed the DFG-founded international interdisciplinary research group ＂Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE). Her research revolves around various topics of student learning and higher education, e.g. professionalism in teaching, the implementation of education policy reform programs, and the international comparison of educational systems. The question of how learning is to be designed in the future using new digital technologies is a central part of her research.

Alexander Mehler is Professor of Computational Humanities / Text Technology at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where he heads the Text Technology Lab. He was a member of the executive committee of the BMBF Centre for Digital Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Education (CEDIFOR) and is a founding member and board member of the German Society for Network Research (DGNet). His research interests include the quantitative analysis and formal modeling of textual and multimodal units in spoken and written communication. He studies socio-semiotic, multi-level, multiplex networks using models of language evolution, multimodal computation, complex systems theory, and machine learning. A current research interest is in 4D technologies based on virtual reality.

Verena Klose has been a senior researcher at the Chair of Neurophysiology of Prof. Jochen Roeper at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany) since 2008. She earned her PhD degree with research based on anxiety-related behavior using a neurobiopsychological approach. She has been focused on improving medical education in recent years. Since 2010, she has been involved in the BRIDGE research project and is currently the Principal Investigator of the CORE subproject C07. In this context, she focuses on domain-specific critical online reasoning in medical students, using an eye-tracking approach for instance.

Marie-Theres Nagel works as a research assistant at the Chair of Economics and Business Education at JGU Mainz, Germany, where she is also doing her PhD on the topic of generic and domain-specific competencies in students taking into account their use of media. Currently, she is working on the CORE project. In the past, she was part of different research projects including BRIDGE focusing on various competencies that are essential for the academic and professional success of students, especially critical thinking and online reasoning.