Five tips to improve students' information evaluation

Teach your students how to separate the good online information from the bad with these five strategies.

By Bill Ferris

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This article is an “instructifeature,” a weekly dose of teaching strategy from LEARN NC’s blog, Instructify. Instructifeatures appear, as if by magic, every Wednesday.

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So your students need to do research for your latest assignment. You’ve probably shown them a few Web-based tools to make their lives easier, too, like Footnote or SlideShare.

Nowadays kids can find out almost everything they want to know online. But as the Luddites love to point out, the Web’s full of half-truths and stuff that’s just plain incorrect. Anybody with an ISP can communicate anything they want to the entire world. So how do you separate the PhD who wants to share his knowledge about Physics from the guy who thinks he’s a scientist because he watched a few episodes of Nova?

If you want your students to grow into intelligent, productive members of society (hint: you do), the best lesson you can teach kids is how to separate the nuts from the nougat for themselves.

With that in mind, here are 5 strategies students (and you) can use to figure out what information is worth citing, and what is worthless.

Know your source

You simply can’t evaluate information if you don’t know where it’s coming from. Students should find out as much information about the author as reasonably possible. A site’s “About Us” page should list stuff like credentials, degrees, publications, or awards. Bonus points for a physical address, as it usually means the author is representing an organization with a reputation to maintain, rather than some guy.

For example, look at the newspaper industry. With the advent of news blogs and the rising costs of paper, why do newspapers continue to hang around when you can find several news blogs, especially on a local level, offering much of the same information for free? A big reason is transparency. The author puts his or her reputation on the line without the safety net of Internet anonymity. That’s not to say bloggers have stuff to hide (especially us at Instructify, honest!) or that they’re unreliable. The point is that the more you know about the author, the easier it is to evaluate what they have to say.

Keep it current

Data can change a great deal over time (particularly scientific), so students should make sure sources are as recent as possible. Moreover, they need to take care that their source clearly states the date the research was conducted or updated. Current information is crucial if the research involves data likely to change over time, such as census figures.

If a student is citing a passage from Shakespeare, he’s probably not going to find anything very recent. But if little Johnny is citing US literacy rates for a position paper on education, then the more recent the data, the better.

Verify it

It pays to know how the author came to his or her conclusion, especially if he or she isn’t a household name. The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries list the following criteria to verify a source’s accuracy:

1. Research documents should explain the research methods.
2. The methods used are both repeatable and appropriate to the subject.
3. The document…well, documents its sources, including a works cited page.
4. The document names names of folks who contributed unpublished info.

Be! (clap) Objective! (clap) B! E! Objective!

What is the author trying to accomplish by putting this information on the Web? To inform or persuade? Perhaps the author has an agenda, such as a set of political beliefs or being vehemently pro- or anti- a hot-button issue.

Authors with axes to grind often back up their positions with cherry-picked data that supports the opinion they already have, rather than data obtained through an objective search. Students should be mindful of neutrality when evaluating a source. It’s worth noting that Wikipedia, bastion of user-created content, often marks articles as being subjective because this problem is so pervasive.

An obviously one-sided source should be viewed with skepticism. Which leads us to…

Follow the money

Do you ever get the feeling some Web content is just a thinly-disguised sales pitch? Copyblogger points out that many pages are designed to pull you in from a Google search, then spit you out to one of its advertisers. Perhaps a Web site or magazine publishes a glowing review on a product that just happens to be its largest advertiser.

Remind your students that if an author has something to gain by swaying his opinion a particular direction, they should take that source with a shaker or two of salt.

Empower students to decide for themselves

No matter how many firewalls and filters schools install, sooner or later kids will have to make their own decisions as to what content is valuable and what’s inappropriate. These tips should get them started being savvy consumers of information. The best thing you can impart to your students is to teach ‘em how to learn.

Credits

Many of the evaluation criteria above were culled from sites such as the aforementioned Johns Hopkins library, Copyblogger, as well as The Virtual Chase, a legal research help site.

Do you have your own tips on how to evaluate information? Share them with your fellow teachers!