This lesson is intended to increase students’ awareness of content types and how various source types are created in order to 1) assist them in accurate citation practices and 2) help them to effectively select and evaluate sources using basic indicators such as purpose, audience, authorship, and additional factors that shape the creation of the source.

A "jigsaw lite" activity to help students recognize that the information tools and systems they use in their everyday and academic lives are not neutral as existing power structures are reflected in the creation, organization, and access of information. Students work in small groups to read an assigned article about bias in a tool, source type, or system and answer questions to share with the larger class.

This lesson is designed for lower-division composition undergraduate students to learn frameworks for evaluating the audience and purpose of various information sources. After analyzing an array of sources for audience and purpose students can dig in to a source in more detail looking for markers of authority and discussing strategies for verifying claims.

BEAM Me Up is a one-shot session that works well in addition to a search strategies class, but can be done without. This session asks students to use the BEAM framework coined by Joseph Bizup to organize and synthesize research materials to create a complex and well-supported argument. Rather than evaluated sources using a checklist, the instructor using BEAM asks students to consider how the information will be used (and to consider how authors use information to build arguments). Adaptors may want to replace the sources given here with ones relevant to the students' curriculum.

A two-credit online undergraduate information literacy course used in an adult degree completion bachelor's program.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.

This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.

Did fake news affect the presidential election? Do websites purposely publish misleading stories? In this workshop, learn how to evaluate the trustworthiness of news stories while responsibly sharing reliable information.

Are you finding reliable sources for your research papers and projects? Has your professor asked you to use scholarly sources? What is a scholarly source anyway? In this workshop, learn how to critically evaluate the information you find through books, articles, and websites.

**This lesson plan was adapted from "Establishing and Applying Evaluation Criteria" p. 74 -78 in Teaching Information Literacy Threshold Concepts Lesson Plans for Librarians, edited by Bravender, McClure, and Schaub (2015).**

In this assignment, students are given a range of newspaper article about science topics and work in pairs to find the original research article that the newspaper article is based on in the library databases. Students then assess when they might use an original research article vs when they might use a well-written newspaper article.