In an effort to provide students with an open space to learn about and discuss recent national concerns over “fake news,” the library offered four sessions of the workshop “Keepin’ It Real: Tips & Strategies for Evaluating Fake News” during a campus-wide Inauguration Teach-In on Friday, January 20, 2017. During this session, students had the opportunity to talk about how misleading news sources (encompassing misinformation, disinformation, click-bait, propaganda, etc.) have affected their views on civil discourse, specifically relating to the recent U.S.

Students will be exposed to various entry points of a sustainability topic in various formats. They will take notes as they experience those expressions on the Elements of Thought evidenced throughout. This in-class, two-part lesson includes an independent guided activity and a Think-Pair-Share activity for further reflection on source/ claimant evaluation. Prior to this lesson, instructor will have chosen a topic relevant to their subject area or course content – Possible examples: food deserts, clean water in US, bee colony collapse.

In small groups students give a presentation examining how the popular media reports scientific findings.

As people rely more and more on social media to get their news, the filter bubble becomes increasingly problematic. In this workshop, students learn how to evaluate whether a news site is reliable. This group activity takes about 30 minutes and can be used for many different audiences by adjusting the examples used.

There is a large body of research on corporate ownership and control of traditional media, such as print, television, and radio. Comparatively, research about corporate control of what we see online is underdeveloped, yet search engines are often the first place students uncritically look for research as opposed to the library website, catalogs, and discovery services. Dr. Safiya Noble shows that Google image searches for black women often perpetuate and reinforce dominant narratives involving racism and misogyny.

This assignment was created for an introductory nutrition course for health related science majors and nonmajors to meet the Information Literacy Flag criteria for the core standards at Loyola Marymount University. The assignment focuses on the evaluation of a primary and secondary source on a specific topic to assess the similarities and differences between the sources of information. The primary goal of the assignment is for a pair of students to select a current popular press article that references a recent scientific journal article.

Using ProQuest SIRS Issues Researcher or similar database, groups of students work together to find and read four informative magazine articles representing a variety of opinions on a topic. For each magazine article they write an MLA citation. In an oral presentation of less than three minutes per group, they summarize the controversy without giving their own opinions and explain why they chose the four articles. Students are told to be prepared to answer questions about their topic and why they selected each of the four articles.

A brief two page handout on how to read abstracts for scholarly journals for lower division undergraduates in particular. Examples include one from social sciences and one from humanities.

This workshop provides an introduction to creating infographics using Piktochart and includes advice on selecting a design, incorporating data, and structuring a story.

Entering students all take MGT101 – Business Management Practice. Creation of a business plan for a unique product or service is the major project for this course. This Library assignment uses a workshop format to give student groups in Management 101 the task of exploring, evaluating, and reviewing a particular resource important in the business plan research process.

This activity asks students to work in groups to evaluate Internet sources to meet a research need. Students will use their available wireless devices, smartphones, tablets, computers, or laptops to retrieve the URLs provided to them. Working together, students will ask evaluation questions, guided by a CRAAP handout (attached) or instructor. Then, groups will share their findings with the class. o Students are grouped (3-4 students per group, number of groups in total is irrelevant what it important is the size of the group remains very small).

This is a short, engaging activity suitable for learners of all levels. In it, students evaluate web sources that are provided by an instructor using the acronym CRAAP (currency, relevance, accuracy, authority, and purpose). Students work together in groups and explore evaluation processes aloud, with guidance from the CRAAP cards and the instructor. This is an adaptation of various evaluating sources activities available in LIS literature and professional resources. This activity is ideally implemented as a kind of collaborative game moderated by the instructor. It is highly adaptable.

This annotated bibliography assignment has five different versions for five different groups of disciplines: arts, humanities, social analysis (social sciences), life and physical sciences, and quantitative reasoning. Each is meant to give students a way to identify and explore the key types of scholarly sources in those disciplinary categories; for example, to understand what is meant by a primary source in each category.

Students create an entry in the Fremont Wiki - http://localwiki.net/fremont. Students incorporate information literacy concepts, have hands-on experience conducting research, and create actual content on the Internet [while also learning how easy it is for anyone to change that content]. It could also be a great chance to get students into local museums and archives.

Syllabus and five assignments within a two-credit live course at undergraduate level. See "Relevant Links" section for access to all assignments. Assignments include a rubric.

A general worksheet for students to find key sources in selected databases for their assignments in Communication Studies.

In this sequence of activities, students will learn how to identify scholarly sources using three pronged test: 1) Is the source written by a researcher or academic 2) Is the source published in a scholarly book or peer reviewed journal, and 3) Does the source have an extensive bibliography. They will then be asked to find one scholarly book and one scholarly article on a general topic.

Learning Activities

Scholarly source pre-test

Students interview their professor(s) and ask them to describe how they do research, how research gets disseminated in their discipline, etc. Each student can ask one question below. This assignment can be useful as a “first day of class” activity for a First Year Seminar. Novice researchers are introduced to scholarly discourse and discipline-specific approaches to producing knowledge by experts.