How do you measure knowledge in new media environment?

Measurement of knowledge is an important issue in media effect studies. It is a tricky problem we have learned. In surveys, typical questionnaires are the name of vice president, identifying policy stance with the party, job title of US chief justice and so on. Based on this scale, pundits argued that the public is too ignorant to sustain a healthy democracy. And they said the public is getting dumber and dumber.

Markus Prior of Princeton Univ. and Arthur Lupia of Michigan Univ. challenged this conventional way of knowledge measures. 2008. Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (1): 169–183.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lupia/Papers/Prior_Lupia_AJPS_2008.pdf

Theory: Knowledge is not only about recall. It is also a learning or searching skill. In cognitive psychology distinction is made between a kind of memory known as “declarative memory” and rule based “procedural memory.”
Method: Experiment that treat monetary reward and 24 hour searching period. Four group. 1 minute and no pay. 1minute and pay. 24hours and no pay. 24 hour and pay.
Null Hypothesis #1: Providing an incentive for correctly answering knowledge questions
will not affect the likelihood of offering a correct answer.
#2: Even if giving respondents extra time increases the number of correct answers, the change will be uninteresting: it will be constant across respondents or simply amplify differences between strong and weak performers.
Result : Null Hypotheses are rejected. The treatments increased the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents’ recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews
Criticism
-Wrong calculation. Reported percent increase, rather than increase in percentage.
-Political learning skills indicate only a potential for making more informed choices.
-This study was not received well. But is it not the concept of political learning skill, or procedural memory included in the concept of political knowledge, since people are linked and searching for information on the web?