Quality Time: Evaluating Sources

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:

·         Learn about Evaluating Sources from the CCCOnline Library Resources on the Student Wiki

·         Evaluating Sources from the Research and Writing Toolkit on the Student Wiki
-Mary Cash

Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.

Effective Rubrics, Part II: Using Rubric Tools

Last week, we posted about our Rubrics Teaching Resources: that is, why and how to use rubrics for your own assignments. This week, we’d like to remind everyone about the rubric tools in D2L that are designed to make your grading life easier. Remember, you may choose to use rubrics within D2L’s rubrics tool or within TurnItIn’s GradeMark. (Both can be attached to assignment dropboxes.)

An advantage of using D2L rubrics is the grades transfer directly to the dropboxes; an advantage of using GradeMark through TurnItIn is that you can see an originality report at same time you’re grading. While you are grading with GradeMark, you also can use and re-use drop-in comments from your QuickMark library, and you and your students can toggle between a summary of all these comments, a “general comments” area, and a rubric scorecard.

Are you using these tools? Feel free to share your experiences in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnline Community.

Effective Rubrics

Rubrics in your courses can be helpful in setting clear standards for assignments and helping students to understand those standards. Visit our rubrics resources to see

*sample rubrics you might adopt in or adapt for your own courses,
*a Rubrics Virtual Tour, and
*Virtual Tour Lecture Notes for your reference.

Your own rubric-related experiences and examples are welcome in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnlineCommunity.

Quality Time: Teaching Students to Fish

“Do we give students the fish, or do we teach them to fish?” often asks Donna Hall, Design Team Coordinator, regarding assignment design. In our classes, the answer may vary based on the course and the type of assignment, but as part of our overall goal to develop students with skills in information literacy, research, and writing, we want to teach our students to fish.

One type of assignment I like to employ in my classes is student-generated content. History is a very broad subject and rather than dictating every detail they are expected to learn in long lectures, I guide students to select topics that fall within certain parameters but interest them. They share their final product with classmates in a discussion or other tool. The students not only learn content from each other’s projects but get to compare their assignments to the work of others in a conscious or unconscious self-evaluation.

One example is a research and writing project that requires students to locate primary and secondary sources on a historical term. In a discussion, they post a brief description of the term, their cited sources, and what we will find useful at each source. Additionally, while working on the discussion, students may ask the instructor or each other questions about sources, citation, or content, building a sense of community. What I have noticed is that by doing the project openly and seeing each others’ examples of how they put research and writing together, the quality of the individual student’s work greatly improves and they become self motivated to be experts on their piece of content.

Want to learn more on student-generated content? Here are two web resources to get you started: http://senerlearning.com/projects/student-generated-content
http://senerlearning.com/category/blog-topics/student-generated-content
Please share with us student-generated content assignments you employ in your courses in the CCCOnline Community Cultivating Excellence discussion.

Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.