#753: Supporting High Schoolers’ Epistemic Vigilance in Everyday Science: Evaluative Strategies and Values Shift Across Sources

The rise of misinformation places new demands on science education to prepare students to critically evaluate information in their daily lives. One approach is to foster epistemic vigilance (i.e., critical awareness of potentially false information). Instruction that explicitly prompts students to critique information and emphasizes the different components of epistemic vigilance may improve student ability to discern misinformation. This exploratory study examines students’ epistemic vigilance during a task in which they evaluated four everyday sources of scientific information. Students demonstrated situational vigilance toward sources they perceived as untrustworthy. Their evaluative strategies and values shifted depending on the task prompts and source characteristics. These findings suggest that students’ reasoning is context-dependent, with their evaluative strategies and values used to judge credibility varying across situations. Building students’ metacognitive understanding of how these evaluative activities and values interact may support more reliable awareness and reasoning about scientific information in everyday contexts.