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Young people growing up in the age of digital information need to be able to distinguish useful information from that which is not. Unfortunately, little is being done to help them. When it comes to evaluating digital information many schools simply fail to provide instruction. To further complicate matters, when students are being trained, school policies and effective instruction are on a collision course concerning what students should be permitted to evaluate. Every school administrator wants to maintain a safe distance between objectionable material and impressionable students. Blocking students from potential contact with sexual predators and other malinformation is absolutely well-intended. However, blocking sites does not help students think critically about the quality of the information they retrieve or prepare them for the real world of information they encounter outside of school. Teachers may contribute to the problem by introducing filters of their own into learning experiences. In practice, it works like this: a teacher wants her class to access digital information, so she conducts a search ahead of time and selects web pages she finds credible and appropriate. Students then engage in a Web quest using pages or sites that have approved content. Aside from the intended benefits of the exercise, the students have missed an opportunity to learn skills in searching and evaluating that they need in the 21st century.  Add up the missed opportunities for meaningful practice and the result is a generation of students for whom the ease ofaccess to information, not its credibility, is the foremost determinant of its quality (Burton and Chadwick, 2000). Students who aren't taught how to evaluate resources have to invent their own standards. As we have found and others affirm, few schools teach evaluation of digital media (e.g., Web pages). Our informal polls of teachers and librarians reveal that less than 7% say they are instructing students in evaluation skills. Whenever we ask students to demonstrate evaluation abilities, we find that very few have had effective training in how to determine the credibility of resources. The connection between searching and evaluating
The same students were given a second search question and asked to search for answers on three Web sites. Two of the three sites were credible. We wanted to see how many students could answer the question using relevant information. As you might expect--and consistent with the five things today's digital generation cannot do--only 33% found relevant information when they had to search for information within the sites we gave them. If we apply this concept to traditional sources we are talking about the difference between opening a book to a specific page and asking the student to read for an answer vs. handing them a book and asking them to find the answer for themselves. We also wanted to see how many students could identify the credible sources. Students who found the relevant information on the pages given to them were accurate only 53% of the time. Students who found relevant information by searching a site were accurate 89% of the time. This suggests a connection between searching and evaluating: students who find information for themselves are signficantly better able to judge its credibility. As we continue to explore the relationship between search skills and evaluative skills there are possibilities to consider:
What you can do to help
Evaluation Criteria : Know what's (not) to like. Starting in grade school, students need to practice skills that will help them discern credibility. Becoming knowledgeable about authorship, publication and accuracy are a good starting place to help young people become discerning consumers of information. For several years, we've provided a tool on our portal called the Evaluation Wizard. It serves as a template for recording thoughts on evaluative aspects of digital media. The Evaluation Wizard's main value derives from ten thoughtful questions. Students use these probing questions to investigate whether information should be trusted or not. Make it a habit to have students answer these questions--their evaluative skills will be strengthened accordingly.
This Kit provides a complete table of these questions with suggested grade levels for introducing them. Many of the criteria should be used routinely across the curriculum to encourage critical thinking about all sources of information. Three of the most powerful criteria, Author, Publisher and Links To are examined further in the Bad Apple mini-lesson, QuickPick: Links To and the Flash-based MicroModule Companions, all available in this Resource Kit. Let them search: Rollyo Evaluation Search The Rollyo Search tool, introduced at the beginning of this series (Rollyo tutorial) and used again in Kit 1.1 (Rollyo minilesson on Inventors), remains a valuable technology that allows students to search and evaluate within a safe environment. Rollyo offers a huge advantage over the typical Web quest. With Rollyo you tailor a personalized search engine called a SearchRoll to meet both curriculum and search training needs. Teachers can hand pick a few questionable sites to be included alongside credible ones and create a closed system with plenty of opportunities for real world searching and evaluating. This does require advance preparation. The teacher must prepare by searching for information, as one would for a Web quest, except that sites that are relevant but questionable are included with those deemed to be credible. Since students will be able to search all of the content on a site, it is important to check out the sites in advance to ensure they do not contain objectionable information. One or more sites containing any of the following characteristics would be good to include in the Searchroll:
This way, when students search, they must stay alert to the possibility that they are retrieving a combination of good and bad information, and they have to be able to tell the difference. This provides an opportunity to introduce evaluation criteria, associated search techniques and assess how well students are doing. You can even make a game out of it: who can spot the phoney information? For a sample Searchroll lesson, refer to Evaluation Challenges in this Kit.
Demonstration Evaluation  Knowing what makes information believable is a 21st Century survival skill. Teachers and administration must shift more responsibility to the students by modeling evaluation skills and providing meaningful opportunities for practice.. A think-aloud is a quick and powerful way to demonstrate effective evaluation strategies in action. For more ideas on what to say during a think-aloud evaluation, check out our library of web page evaluations. Assessment Several new interactive flash games are included in this Resource Kit to help you assess students' abilities to evaluate information. First, the most authentic is this month's featured Search Challenge, Highest Lake. This live search opportunity returns conflicting answers to the question, "what is the name of the highest freshwater lake in Tibet?" Players have to figure out which answer is the most credible. This will help you see if students can apply evaluation criteria effectively to a search problem. The Highest Lakes Search Challenge could be played prior to instruction, to heighten awareness of evaluation, and followed by the Cell Phone Search Challenge to assess the impact of instruction. In the Cell Phone Search Challenge, students encounter inaccurate information that answers the question, "On what day did Illinois announce that drivers under the age of 18 cannot drive while talking on cell phones?" They must use evaluative skills to decide which answer is right. Thanks to Mary Alice Hartline from Anna, IL who suggested the topic. She won this custom-designed Search Challenge for her 9th grade keyboarding class in a recent 21CIF Webinar and is sharing her prize in this Kit. Two sets of interactive tutorials, Use it? or Lose it? and Bad Apple, may be used for instruction or assessment. Using standard evaluation criteria, students assess questionable web sites, sorting eight different factors according to credibility. The sorting feature creates a visual argument from which students make a final choice to use the information or lose it. Three new MicroModule Companions provide in-depth instruction in skills related to Authorship, Publication, and Links To. Each tutorial offers formative feedback in terms of comments and a score that helps students gauge their proficiency using these techniques. Each MicroModule Companion is linked to a MicroModule that may be studied separately to improve one's score. Finally, the IMSA Evaluation Wizard may be used to assess students' skills. Simply assign a Web page and have students answer the evaluation questions provided. Students can copy their responses from the Evaluation Wizard and paste them into a word processed file to serve as a record of their progress.
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Our research suggests that students who search for digital information are better able to judge its credibility than students who are handed information. In a pilot study, over 100 middle school students were given a question and three relevant web pages for answering it. Two of these pages were credible. The success rate for answering the question using relevant information was 73% when the task involved reading the three pre-selected pages.
