Source Matters

I have been thinking about web evaluation lately. Evaluation has always been a part of higher level thinking, it is not something new. Now it is in the skill set that schools are currently calling 21st Century skills, like nobody needed to know how to evaluate before that, because you can believe everything you read, right?

Well, anyway, I decided to try something new this year. I wanted to have the best chance to teach, or at least expose students to web evaluation skills in the library. I talked to our speech teachers here at school, and they were both very open to doing a lesson about evaluation. The best thing about having it in speech class, is that students are all required to take speech, so I will, hopefully, see all students at some point in their high school academic career. It was very interesting to say the least. I started out by talking about evaluating for relevance and then we talked about different criteria. Then I modeled evaluating a web site using the FLIP IT form, and we went through the steps together. At this point, I gave them a two sided copy of the form, and had them evaluate two websites from the links that I had put on the evaluation lesson page. After about 20 minutes, we met back together and discussed the results. I had put websites that were good sources, some that were obvious fakes, and some less obvious fakes. Most of them knew the good when they saw it, and most (although it was about 75%) were able to spot the obviously bogus. Where there were sometimes issues was in spotting the websites that looked good, but were not reliable sources. These less obvious bad sites were only accurately evaluated about 50% of the time. While I was happy that the students listened and took part in the lesson, it concerns me that they still did not consistently identify the bogus websites, even when they knew ahead of time that some of them were not accurate. I am just hoping that at least they will start thinking about the web sites they use more carefully, and look carefully at the sites they choose to use.