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Library Instruction Activities: Evaluate Info

For librarians only

What's the Evidence?

This Jeopardy-style game asks students to place statements within one of the following categories:

  • Research-based evidence
  • Not generalizable research
  • Anecdotal evidence
  • Belief

The statements are distributed across 5 categories:

  • Robots (Business)
  • It's Gettin' Hot in Here (Environmental Science)
  • Vaccines (Health Sciences)
  • Muggle Studies (Literature)
  • OKMatchHarmony.com (Social Sciences)

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

  • Use the game Telestrations (or just plain old telephone) to illustrate the difference between primary and secondary sources
  • As a follow-up, show students a newspaper article that mentions a scientific study (make sure it's not linked); whoever finds the original study first, wins
  • Discuss the advantages/disadvantages of primary and secondary sources

Evaluating Websites

Visual Literacy

  • Show students YouTube video (such as)
  • Ask What is the OECD (or entity responsible for the video)?
  • Watch again—have students call out what points they would want to confirm
  • What are likely sources? Who’s gathering these statistics?
    • Acknowledge that every source that’s gathered has some bias, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use it
  • Have students use statistics they found to create charts and graphs using Excel or infograph tools such as Piktochart or Infogr.am or Visual.ly
  • Could also have students develop video tours of the library using facts and data they find about the library, or have them find information about some aspect of themselves
    • e.g. % of college grads in their zip code using American FactFinder (Where did primary data come from? Who made it?)

Evaluating Articles Using Criteria

  • Write the following evaluation critera on the board:
    • Currency
    • Relevance
    • Authority
    • Accuracy
    • Purpose
  • Ask students to help you define/explain what each criteria means
  • Break students into 5 groups
  • Give each group the same set of 3 articles (both popular and scholarly, from a range of dates), and hand each group a card which has one of the above criteria written on it
  • Ask the groups to evaluate their three articles based on their criterion only (e.g. Currency), and to give it a score 1-5
  • Total the scores for all three articles on the board
  • Discuss which article received the highest/lowest score and why