UPDATE: PLEASE USE SIFT & PICK INSTEAD!

I created the SIFT & PICK Fact Checking & Source Evaluation process to improve upon P.R.O.V.E.N. SIFT & PICK better distinguishes between lateral reading to fact check information and vertical reading to select the best sources for specific information needs. It is briefer and better lends itself to teaching concepts such as information creation,  authority/expertise, bias, and scholarly conversation, in the context of source evaluation.

Ellen Carey 4/14/23

P.R.O.V.E.N. was designed to provide students with a source evaluation process that was grounded in both the ACRL Framework and Michael Caulfield's "Four Moves and a Habit" from his ebook, "Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers" (2017). The process included both strategies for fact-checking by examining other sources such as internet fact-checking tools, and strategies for analyzing the source itself by examining its purpose, relevance, objectivity, verifiability, expertise, and newness. The "P.R.O.V.E.N." acronym emphasized the process students could go through to demonstrate credibility based on their particular needs, rather than the state of a particular source (i.e. credible or not). The questions were designed to guide this evaluation process, not to serve as a checklist.

Students often depend on citation generators provided by databases, library discovery tools, and websites when tasked with correctly formatting their references. However, these generators often make mistakes that students don’t notice. This activity will help students to look critically at the citations provided by citation generators and to find the mistakes. This will both help students learn the citation style of their discipline and to look more critically at seemingly quick fixes during the research process.

This small group zine-making activity can be adapted for any discipline.

This activity was created to introduce first-year students to library resources they can use for their annotated bibliography assignment. In pairs, students are assigned a task card that requires them to find an information source. After finding a source meeting the criteria of their task card, the student teams input their answers into a Google Form. Formative assessment takes place during class, allowing the librarian to modify instruction on-the-spot based on the responses from the form.

Summative assessment takes place at the end of the semester, when a rubric is applied to a sample of student responses from the activity. This assessment provides a more thorough picture of where students may have succeeded or struggled with the activity, and may provide ideas for how to adjust the activity in the future.

This recipe is from The First-Year Experience Cookbook, edited by Raymond Pun and Meggan Houlihan and written by Elisa Slater Acosta and Katherine Donaldson.

This resource and accompanying assignment focuses on evaluating news sources/claims and were used in an online information literacy class.

With a wealth of sources, archives offer numerous educational opportunities for students to enhance critical analysis, historical inquiry, and information literacy skills. This workshop demonstrates Research as Inquiry, as it guides students through the steps of initial inquiry with primary sources in archives: basic description, context investigation, and disciplinary questions. The Analyzing Archival Sources Worksheet is adaptable for instruction on physical and digital archives pertaining to local communities and urban development. Additional research assignments are suggested to create a scaffolding learning experience on archival research.

As part of a larger news evaluation campaign, Sara Davidson Squibb and colleagues (Lindsay Davis, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco and Elizabeth Salmon) created a jigsaw lesson to use with introductory writing courses. Students were asked to evaluate an article’s content, tone, and purpose in a large group before they discussed the article in the context of two other articles on the same topic in a smaller group. After these group discussions, the library instructor revealed the source of each news article and highlighted resources and strategies for learning more about news sources. Through the lesson, students were able to focus more on content, corroboration, and source knowledge (rather than a mere checklist) to make decisions about an article’s bias and level of accuracy. All four instruction librarians taught this lesson to multiple sections of introductory writing courses. Though the librarians started with an original set of three articles on the topic of health care enrollment, we also identified two other sets of materials that were targeted to the course content of specific introductory writing sections.

Katelyn Burton (kburton@virginiawestern.edu) created the framework for this lesson plan while an Instruction Librarian at Radford University, a jigsaw comparing four different sources. Katelyn and Alyssa Alyssa worked with Dr. Michele Ren's Women's and Gender Studies 200 class at Radford. Dr. Ren asked for something related to global women's issues. Alyssa decided that the "Share the Load" Ariel commercial related to gender divisions of household labor would be topical, and something that students could relate to, and chose four sources that fit into Katelyn's framework.

A two part instruction session that uses the "fish bowl" method, or students as instructors, to find scholarly sources and complete an annotated bibliography citation.

An activity to teach students how to construct database searches using Boolean operators.