Listening to Alarm Bells: Internalizing Source Evaluation

I've been on the journey about how to "do" source evaluation for 20 years now. 

Checklists! Acronyms! Do's and Don'ts! Domains matter - actually, they don't. Wikipedia is trash - actually it's a gold mine. 

We've evolved in our fact-checking abilities as information has become increasingly fed into our personalized feeds and misinformation has become increasingly sophisticated. 

Inspired by other librarians, I've been teaching evaluative "moves" rather than focusing on fixed items to look for in a source. It's much better. 

The moves include strategies like lateral reading and reading upstream. 

But there's been a step of the evaluation process that I've missed, and that is: When is Source Evaluation necessary and how do I know? 

Until students internalize that answer for themselves, my teaching is incomplete.

The answer for when to use evaluation "moves" isn't simple: 

• Do I evaluate everything I come in contact with? 
• Do I evaluation only if I have a doubt about the information? 
• Do I evaluate information I agree with?
• Do I evaluate based on the purpose of my information task? (schoolwork vs. personal entertainment vs. things posted to my feeds?)

Answers might be determined by...

• Time (I don't have time to check this)
• High Investment (I'm re-sharing this so I want to check it)
• Low Investment (I'm just watching for fun, so I really don't care)
• Prior Knowledge (I've been to this site before and already vetted it)

The shortest answer and most teachable point is that the student must choose when to implement evaluative moves and that choice needs to be INTENTIONAL.

Acting on an intentional choice is empowering. So I try to help students identify their internal critical thoughts in the first few seconds of seeing new information.

One label I'm using is "Alarm Bells"

Where are the places on a webpage that might set off an alarm in your head? 

We draw sample webpages and star places where our eyes might quickly encounter an alarm bell. 

• No author? 
• Unfamiliar organization? 
• Date updated/created? 
• Secure URL if we're shopping? 
• Monetized via ads? 

Listening to these alarms is the beginning to listening to our inner critical voice and making decisions about when to use evaluation moves.

This is just one step in the process to internalize the Source Evaluation process. The next step: using questions (such as the 5Ws) to make sense of the source and its possible uses.

My goal: No acronyms, no teacher reminders. Rather, students encounter content and have internalized a way to handle it based on their needs.