It’s fall in an election year, and my eighth-grade students will soon be researching controversial issues relevant to the political conversation. Most of their reading about these issues will be online, and not all of those sources will be reliable. For many years, researchers like Coiro, Coscarelli, Maykel, and Forzani (2015) have found that students struggle to determine the reliability of web sources. Evaluation requires thoughtful examination, and students often overlook the factors that matter most to a site’s reliability.

 

As a teacher, media specialist, and literacy researcher, my opinion on what works to encourage effective online source evaluation has evolved. I began teaching the use of evaluation checklists, but my secondary students rarely transferred these to other information-seeking tasks. I tried acronym-based strategies for memorizing questions or inquiry processes. These were certainly more streamlined, but students still didn’t own the process the way I wanted them to.

Recently I’ve tried another approach for teaching web evaluation to secondary students. It follows these central principles:

Reliability is not black and white; it is almost always gray. 

Most sources fall on a continuum between ideal and completely unreliable. Teaching students this important concept prepares them to expect complexity in the evaluation process.

Whether a source is reliable will depend on your purpose.

Although a site might be perfect for exploring an unfamiliar issue, it may not be the best source for evidence to support a reasoned argument. I teach students to define their purpose clearly and judge reliability in the context of it.

Different sources are held to different standards.

The problem with one site may be its lack of source information; another may be the author’s lack of expertise; still another may be a site’s affiliations. I consider again and again the reliability of the source and the most important things to notice. This reorients the inquiry wholly in the mind of the student, who must determine for herself or himself what most affects the reliability of the source at hand. It’s a difficult task, so we use two logical sentence prompts to scaffold students’ investigation: “I notice...” and “I wonder…” At this stage, we’ll often divide into pairs to share and compare our noticings and wonderings.

Discussion is essential!

Once students have examined sites individually or in pairs, we conduct a class discussion (in my class, a Socratic seminar) opening with the essential discussion of noticing and wondering. If necessary, I prompt students to examine what the group missed, but students usually challenge each other’s thinking:  Did anyone click on this author’s bio? (It includes nothing suggesting expertise on the topic.) Did anyone follow the source links? (They all take us to the same research study.) Did anyone notice who funded this research on cell phones? (It was sponsored by a phone service company.) What could be problematic about that? As students sort out answers to the essential question, they practice and internalize the habits of thinking that thoughtful evaluation requires.

Practice, practice, practice!

Students examine a variety of sites independently and participate in a handful of group discussions about those. Finally, they apply their evaluation skills in an independent inquiry project.

By the end of this unit my students begin to approach the evaluation process differently—noticing, wondering, questioning, and investigating. As one student proclaimed, “I’ll never look at a website the same way again!” 

Angie Johnson is a technology integrationist, media specialist, and language arts teacher at Lakeshore Middle School in Stevensville, Michigan. National Board Certified in 2002, she has been an educator for over 25 years and is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University.

This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).