Mary Cash, CCCOnline Librarian, is back this week! Please feel free to join the library and information literacy conversations in the companion Community threads!
Do you have discussion or other assignments where you ask your students to find web sites that are relevant to what they are learning for a particular unit? Are you frustrated with the quality of the sources they find? Taking time to teach your students to evaluate sources will not only improve the quality of sources your students use for assignments, but you will also be helping your students develop the important life-long learning skill of becoming a good consumer of information.
I teach ENG 122 – the research paper – and it’s important for my students to learn good research skills. When I first got my class, there was a discussion on academic integrity, and another on source credibility. But most of my students weren’t very discerning when it came to choosing sources for their research paper. They didn’t seem to understand why choosing an article about using the herb St. John’s Wort from a website designed to sell herbs might not be the best source for their argumentative research paper. Likewise, some students who were against animal testing didn’t think twice about quoting heavily from the PETA website.
I decided my students needed to learn to think more critically about the sources (all of them) they were reading and planning to use in their research papers, so I put on my librarian hat and went to research what other instructors and librarians did to help students learn to be better consumers of information. What I finally opted to do was add in an additional short essay to the unit that has the discussion on sources. The short essay – called the Source Evaluation – requires that students watch a tutorial on evaluating sources (Evaluating Information Interactive Tutorial). Then students need to go locate a website and an article (preferably from an online article database) related to their topic. The Source Evaluation assignment asks the students to evaluate each source on the basis of the following criteria: Authority, Objectivity, Accuracy and Scope. In their essay, students need to explain why, or why not, each source meets the 4 criteria and to offer explanation and examples to illustrate this, and they need to state if the source will be a good one for their research paper, and again, why or why not.
In addition to adding the Source Evaluation Essay, I revised the source credibility discussion to ask the students to consider what they learned about source credibility from their Source Evaluation assignment. Over and over, students state that they didn’t realize they couldn’t believe everything they read on the Web. Websites and articles they originally thought of as great sources for their papers turned out to be biased, unsupported, from a questionable authority and don’t meet their research needs. Doing the source evaluation made students realize they shouldn’t take information at face value and that they needed to be looking for higher quality sources. And this was what I was aiming for. I want my students to leave ENG 122 with better research skills and to be better consumers of the information that constantly bombards them.
If you want to learn more about Evaluating Sources or if you want your students to learn about this, we have quite a bit of information available on the Student Wiki under the CCCOnline Library Resources and the Help with Research section of the Research Writing Toolkit. Here are the links:
Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.
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