Choosing & Using Sources: Instructor Resources

Pre-Class Preparation

• Review the handout for this activity.
• Review In-Class Procedure below.
• Read Choosing and Using Sources, Chapter 6, Evaluating Sources, “A Source’s Neighborhood,” which students will be referring to on their devices to make their evaluations.
• Consider assigning students to read before class Choosing and Using Sources, Chapter 6, Evaluating Sources, “A Source’s Neighborhood,” which students will be referring to on their devices to make their evaluations.
• Decide on an online scholarly source appropriate for your class that students can evaluate. Record its URL so you can give it to students. Assume that the students’ purpose for considering that source is to use it for a research assignment. In this activity, students can learn most about evaluation from sources whose credibility across factors varies some. For that reason, perhaps a website article might be best. But you are the best judge of which source to use.
• Prepare to introduce the session, using your own remarks or In-Class Procedure, if it is helpful.
• Using In-Class Procedure, plan your discussion of the groups’ evaluations.
• Print 1 copy per student and 1 for yourself of Handout 6A-1.
• Decide how many groups to have in class. To the extent possible, assign 4 students to each group. If you have to assign more or fewer than four students to each group, that should work fine, and having an uneven number of students in the groups is no problem.
• Download and perhaps print In-Class Procedure so you can take it with you to class.

In-Class Procedure

1. 1. On the board, write the URL for the source you selected.
   2. Point to the source’s URL you put on the board, and tell students they are going to start evaluating the credibility of this source today.
   3. Explain that since there is no source that’s guaranteed to be 100% correct or true, we’re all required to make inferences as we evaluate the credibility of our sources. Inferences are educated guesses made after observations and investigation. We examine sources and infer how credible they are. If we infer they are credible enough for our purpose, we use them in our research projects. This means evaluating sources for research projects takes lots of critical thinking.
   4. Explain that inferences are educated guesses made after observations and investigation. For instance, they all inferred that this class would be meeting today, based on what they had observed about the class so far and what they know about Ohio State. There are good techniques for making good inferences about sources’ credibility, and today they’ll get to use some of those techniques.
   5. Ask students to get into groups of 4 or the number you decided on.
   6. Assign each group a number.
   7. Pass out Handout 6A-1 to every student.
   8. Suggest that if one or more group members did not bring an electronic device, those within the group who did should share their device(s).
   9. Tell students that they will have only about 5 minutes to do their evaluations after reading the handout, so they should get started quickly.
   10. While students work, draw this matrix with as many group columns as you need. (Group columns need to be wide enough for only 1 capital letter.)
       

       Factor	Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4	Group 5	Group 6	Group 7
       Web Neighborhood

        

   11. After about 5 minutes, ask any reporter who hasn’t reported his/her group’s grade to put it on the board.
   12. Once all groups’ neighborhood “grades” are on the board, compare the “grades” for the source across groups. Remind students of what the “grades” stand for (A=Very Acceptable, B= Good, but could be better, C= OK in a pinch, D= Marginal, and F= Unacceptable). Point out the variation or uniformity across groups. Ask some questions, such as what made any group member question the source’s credibility web neighborhood and subsequently give it a low “grade.” If two groups gave very different grades, ask group members to explain how that happened—did one group notice something that the other group did not? Or, maybe something both groups saw was more important to one group than the other?
   13. Let students know that evaluating a source will get faster and easier for them the more they do it. And there will be ample opportunity for them to do it, especially since a source’s Web neighborhood is only 1 of 4 factors that should be evaluated. If you’re going to use Activities 6B, 6C, and 6D, tell them that they will get more practice evaluating the other factors.
   14. Before closing this activity, suggest that students write down the URL for Choosing & Using Sources so they can use that free web book in the future when they need information about working with sources.
   15. If you are going to do Activities 6B, 6C, 6D, and 6E in upcoming classes with these students, take a photo of the grades on the board or otherwise record them so you’ll have them for a comparison of grades across factors.

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   Relevant Choosing & Using Sources Chapters:

   Chapter 6, Evaluating Sources.