One of the central challenges educators face today, especially in higher education, is the gap between warranted (domain-specific) knowledge and the prior beliefs students hold about certain concepts and phenomena (preconceptions). In the Internet age, students often self-directedly acquire knowledge from an increasingly large number of…

There are two distinct purposes to this investigation: to develop the predictive power of the theory of political information efficacy and to determine how exposure to political information formats on the Internet under distinctly different interactive conditions affects cognitive and affective processes. Examined in the first section of this…