Context: This activity is best suited for a teaching strategy focused on evaluating sources and articulating evaluation criteria.
Assessment: This activity provides opportunities for discussion, which can be used as formative assessment ensuring students understand the concepts. The final 5-minute paper could provide summative assessment if its collected by the librarian at the end of class.
Time: 30 minutes
This set of activities gets students thinking about the links between evaluating interpersonal rumor, online news sources, and academic/scholarly sources. Students circle the room writing on large sticky pads and at the end of the activity have the opportunity to reflect on their own thinking by writing their own strategies for evaluation. Optional: use the 5W source evaluation handout for a portion of the activity.
Context: This activity is best suited for learning outcomes related to source evaluation. Some librarians find it useful to use this exercise after a teaching strategy related to database searching.
Assessment: This activity results in a student-generated list of evaluation criteria. These lists can be used to formatively assess students' learning of the concept. If the lists are collected by the librarian, they can be used to do a summative assessment.
Time: 30 minutes
In this exercise, students will practice coming up with a search strategy, finding articles in a search database, and evaluating sources based on a list of criteria that they create.
This exercise is good to engage your students in thinking about evaluation, and it allows them to put their evaluation in practice with articles they have found on a database.
Context: This activity is best suited as part of a teaching strategy introducing students to various types of sources and how they are used.
Assessment: This activity generates opportunities for formative assessment while students share out their process. A librarian can use these share-outs to assess if students are understanding the concepts.
Time: 20 minutes
This activity asks students to evaluate the sources based on the questions here or questions appropriate to the source types/course. Have students report back about the sources they evaluated. This activity ideally helps students differentiate between sources in their "natural habitats", database records, webpages, catalog records and think about source differences
Context: This activity is best suited for lessons with learning outcomes related to examining reliability, validity, accuracy, authority, and bias.
Assessment: This activity results in a worksheet or discussion where students identify strategies for evaluating information. The resulting worksheet or discussion can be used for formative assessment to ensure students understand the concept.
Time: 15 minutes
This worksheet gives students the opportunity to work through evaluating an article using the classic Who What Where set of questions. The associated teaching module gives suggestions for using the worksheet in class.
Alternative worksheets for source evaluation
Context: This is an entire lesson plan for learning outcome(s) about news or web-based information evaluation.
Assessment: This lesson plan has several strategies for assessing student learning, including discussions and a final activity.
Time: 75 minutes
This is a lesson plan that can be used when you want students to evaluate sources - especially news and web-based sources.
75 minutes, active learning
Citations for sample article searching:
Gilman, J., Kuster, J., Lee, S., Lee, M., Kim, B., Makris, N., . . . Breiter, H. (2014). Cannabis use is quantitatively associated with nucleus accumbens and amygdala abnormalities in young adult recreational users. The Journal of Neuroscience : The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 34(16), 5529-38. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4745-13.2014
McCoy, T. (April 16 2014). Even casually smoking marijuana can change your brain, study says. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/16/even-casually-smoking-marijuana-can-change-your-brain-study-says/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2f01a5b43806
Types of Periodicals*
|
Scholarly |
Popular |
Trade |
|
research projects, methodology, and theory |
personalities, news, and general interest articles |
industry trends, new products or techniques, and organizational news |
|
written for a specialized audience |
written for general audience |
written for a specialized audience |
|
articles by subject experts |
articles by journalists and generalists |
articles by those knowledgeable in the field |
|
authors from academic institutions |
authors are staff or freelance writers |
articles written by contributing authors |
|
highly focused topics geared towards researchers and professionals |
more generalized topics geared towards nonprofessionals |
topics geared towards members of a specific business, industry or organization |
|
primary research or literature review |
secondary sources |
primary and secondary sources |
|
peer-reviewed (usually) |
edited but not peer-reviewed |
editorial review |
|
include bibliographies |
no bibliographies |
may have short bibliographies |
|
many have dull covers |
glossy, eye-catching covers |
often glossy paper |
|
few or no advertisements |
heavy advertisements |
moderate advertisements – all or most are trade related |
|
Journal of Food Science Urban Studies Journal of Applied Psychology Journal of Extension |
Gourmet New York Psychology Today Time |
Chilton’s Food Engineering Public Management APA Monitor Advertising Age |
* Periodical is a generic term used for popular magazines, trade or professional journals, and scholarly journals. They are materials that are published at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, daily, etc.).
Currency
Note: The currency standard will differ depending on the discipline.
Authority
Scope
Accuracy
General assessment strategies:
|
Print Resources |
Web Pages |
Databases |
|
Scan table of contents |
Scan menus |
Review help section |
|
Scan title page |
Scan root page |
Read about/scope information |
|
Scan index(es) |
Scan site map |
Review the list of publications/sources included |
|
Read preface |
Read introduction |
Determine the vendor/source |
|
Scan references/bibliography |
Scan references/bibliography |
|
|
Read author’s bio |
Read author’s bio |
|
Developed by Sara Lowe and Karen Wallace; informed by Libraries Linking Idaho course on evaluating reference sources
For students in the sciences, review articles are often the best starting place for research projects since they give students an overview of the field before they dive into the primary literature. However, even upper-level students often have not been introduced to review articles. The infographic below on finding and using review articles can be added to a course guide or distributed to students before class as an introduction to review articles.
