Source Criticism in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools : Teachers' and Students' Views on Source Criticism

The aim with this study is to examine how students and teachers value source criticism. Partly, this regards how teachers practice this in their teaching and how students work with it during lessons – but also how students value source criticism in situations where the teacher not has pointed out that this topic is part of the actual assignment. Moreover, there is a focus on investigating how students who are critical of the sources take this into account in their daily lives; for example, when they surf on the Internet or when they discuss news articles or other media. This essay is based on interviews with students and teachers, using a qualitative method. The results of this study show that both students and teachers find source criticism to be of major importance. However, the results show that the students relate source criticism with school, since the students feel that the perspective of criticism gets omitted in daily situations where they do not get assessed. Additionally, this study makes it clear that teachers are working with source criticism in similar ways. For example, all teachers who participated in this study seem to include a period during the students’ first year on upper secondary school with an emphasis on this particular area. Thereafter, source criticism is included frequently in the teaching through analyses in the tasks that follow. Nevertheless, the students highlighted that they would like more concrete teaching within the area of source criticism on a frequent basis during lessons, especially during the later terms of upper secondary school.