UNDERSTANDING SUSCEPTIBILITY TO EDUCATIONAL INACCURACIES: Examining the Likelihood of Adoption Model

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the nature of inaccurate information in education and to identify the factors that may influence individuals’ adoption of accurate, inaccurate, or misleading information from text. We begin by defining the origins, features, and types of educational inaccuracies that students may encounter. We then introduce the likelihood of adoption model (LAM) to taxonomize the learner and message related factors that may impact students’ adoption of accurate and inaccurate information, alike. In an initial test of the LAM, hypotheses introduced by this model were largely supported. Students found the provision of more evidence to be more convincing than the provision of less evidence, and students preferred statistical information to anecdotal information. Moreover, these effects manifest regardless of whether students were presented with accurate or inaccurate information, suggesting that both types of information are processed similarly by learners. This work suggests the importance of teaching students to engage in more deliberative processing, rather than using heuristics to evaluate information.