Teach Information Literacy & Critical Thinking!  Tags: research researching library_instruction information_literacy critical_thinking plagiarism citation topic_selection topic_narrowing topic_broadening ge_clusters librarians  

Please suggest links to add or delete, or text to change on this page. Thanks!

  

Submit a Link

Many students think they are good researchers because they can use Google and Wikipedia. However, they may not know how to evaluate and select useful web sites, blogs and other information available through web. See below for help with this problem.

After completing an exercise or going through an interactive online information literacy tutorial, or after reading through evaluative criteria, all students will apply three or more evaluative criteria in order to select useful information available through the Web.

Exercise--in-class (15 min.):

• Ask students to pair up and go to this site:
  

Hoax? Personal Opinion? Scholarly Research? You Decide!

• Assign pairs to Group 1 (Authority and Accuracy), Group 2 (Advocacy and Objectivity) or Group 3 (Currency and Coverage)
  
• Ask students to review at least 2 web sites in their Group, keeping the Group's topic area in mind  (allow 2-3 minutes)
• Ask Groups to report back, but save Group 2 for last
• After Group has reported back, focus on the Martin Luther King, Jr. sites
• For the "Martin Luther King Jr., a Historical Examination" site, scroll down, click on "Hosted by Stormfront," and discuss the importance of knowing the purpose and sponsor/author of a site

Exercise--homework

Assign a critical thinking essay using the Hoax?... exercise site.

Exercise--in-class (10 min.) or homework:

• Ask students to do a general Google search and a Google Scholar search for information on a given topic.
• Ask them to compare those results with results from sites reviewed and selected by librarians...

• Librarians Internet Index
• Infomine (scholarly web sites)--UC Riverside

Evaluative Criteria (web sites, blogs, social networking sites, etc.):

• Cohen, Laura and Trudi Jacobson. 2008. Evaluating Web Content. (includes document repositories, blogs and wikis, social networking sites, etc.)
• Grassian, Esther. 2008.  Thinking Critically About World Wide Web Resources. (Originally created, 1995)
• _____. 2006. Thinking Critcally About Web 2.0 & Beyond.
• Think critically about websites, and evaluate blogs, social networking sites, etc., for research. Test your web critical thinking skills with "Hoax?..." exercises.

Online Tutorial (lessons, interactive exercises):

• Road to Research: Judge for Yourself: Websites

• Road to Research: Judge for Yourself: Exercise

• Road to Research: Judge for Yourself: Quiz (Guest; Login--UCLA only)