Reading
Assessing the Quality of Information
Several years ago, I worked closely with the NEA sponsored site, BetterLesson.com, to develop a yearlong science curriculum. As part of the beginning of the year units, I created a lesson entitled “But it’s on the Internet”, which is aimed at helping students develop a critical eye when evaluating the credibility and reliability of sources. During that lesson, my students are introduced to what I call the “Cite-It” rubric, a modified version the the CRAAP test developed by Meriam Library at California State University-Chico. As I mention on the original lesson, “While the CITE IT acronym might be less memorable to the students than CRAAP, I believe it more appropriate for the middle school audience.”
A couple of years after that, I transformed the paper CITE-IT rubric into a digital version where my students could compile the resources they were vetting (or not), along with their scores and comments, and discussed its use in the Should I Cite It lesson on KQED teach. These are the most recent digital versions:
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The CITE-IT Rubric
Teaching students how to evaluate the media they encounter is not a one shot deal. It requires continuous practice, so that it can become second nature, regardless of whether they are using media in an academic setting or not. Thus, once I have illustrated the use of the rubric and explain that it is a required component of all the work they submit, I follow it up with writing assignments such as the one you see below, and which I will use to demonstrate competency.
This writing assignment follows a unit on Evolution, where the students have already been exposed to the content and created different products to demonstrate their knowledge. The writing assignment is pretty straight forward. Students are provided with a prompt that asks them to write an argumentative essay that responds to question “Should we bring back extinct species?”. The prompt includes the links to several media products:
A brief newscast: Scientist Tries To Bring The Woolly Mammoth Back From The Dead
An article written by a group of high school students: Should we bring back extinct species?
An article from the New York Times: We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth the Cost?
An article and video combination from Quest: Reawakening Extinct Species
An infographic: Resurrection Biology
The different media was selected as a way to provide enough information to start the research and pique students’ interest, but not quite enough to give them a full answer or to push them in a specific direction for their answer. The students are also tasked to do some research on their own to help substantiate their claims, adding at least two other resources. All of the resources (both mine and theirs) are put to the CITE-IT test as illustrated below. (Clicking on the images will open the file for better viewing)
The additional comments section of the rubric, which is a required component, serves as a place for students to refine their ideas regarding the use of the different sources of information. In the examples provided above, you may notice the internal conversation the students have as they justify the use of a source that may not initially seem very reliable since they are able to find cross check the information between sources.
Their final products illustrate the use of the resources they deemed acceptable.
Deconstructing Media
Much like the ideas presented in the previous section, The deconstruction of media by students takes much practice. In order to provide effective scaffolds for this, I first present a lesson entitled “Stop the Spread of Fake News”, developed while taking the KQED Teach course Finding and Evaluating Information. This lesson complements the Cite-It lesson by introducing the analysis of media in terms of bias alterations, and endorsement.
The assignment I will discuss below was created as part of my students’ participation in the Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge. The topic of the challenge was Climate Change. As part of their research portion, and in order to develop a problem statement, they were tasked with creating an infographic that represented their research findings. Since this topic lends itself to students finding all sorts of biased information, I included the need not only to use the CITE-IT rubric, but also to deconstruct it ensuring that they completed a cross-reference check for author, organization, author’s purpose, etc. Within the requirements for this deconstruction, they have access to the following slide deck, wich provides them with a sample of the kind of work expected, and serves as an annotated list of resources for this portoflio.
Their media deconstructions shown below may not be incredibly sofisticated, but show practice of the skill and allow me to determine the level of engagement during the lateral reading process they used to determine the validity of thir resources.
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Reflection
In this era of instant access to information, we are all constantly bombarded with messages. As adults, we are constantly trying to weed out the truth but as we are well aware, it is often harder than one thinks. It is easy to trust our brains into believing something, simply because it confirms what we already suspect or know, and we trust familiar outlets of information to provide us with the information that we seek. However, as we are all aware, this blind trust puts us in a disadvantageous position, not because we cannot trust these media creators, but rather because as we analyze the messages we also have to contend with our own confirmation biases.
When I first started teaching about evaluating resources (CITE-IT), it was pretty straight forward. I believed that I could teach the lesson and the students would continue to keep it up simply because I asked them to include their scores when they added their sources. Of course that did not work out that way. I started finding CITE-IT scores for Google searches and scores that were really just numbers added at the end with no documentation or thought. At the time, I revamped the usage adding what I called the “evidence based” CITE-IT, where students had to include specific details that led them to the different scores. Although this worked for a while, it was cumbersome for the students to use, and soon abandoned. However, I knew that I could not give up in the pursuit of helping my students develop their skills in evaluating sources, after all, these skills go hand in hand with the critical thinking skills they need for other pursuits. As I continued to finesse the usage of the rubric, I ended up with the version that I included in this portfolio, which the students have been more willing to use consistently. This consistent use is also the result of some modeling, since I will often (though not always) bring up my own copy as I am working with students to illustrate how it can be used as a place of curation (i.e. “I already have looked for and vetted resources around this topic in the past. Let’s see what I already have that I can use for this project.”) In my particular setting, where I see the students for several years and thus repeat topics of study, this above all has been what has really convinced my students of the value of evaluating their sources more thoroughly the first time around.
Now, the thinking about “analyzing production” has been much harder for me to teach and to use myself consistently. When I took the module on KQED teach, most of what I learned was completely new. I saw the value of developing my own skills and teaching them to students, but it has been hard to address this consistently. In my own life, I don’t always have the time to cross check facts and do a deep dive into the author of a particular piece. However, I have become much more aware of production techniques and reading media with a critical eye to identify bias. It helped that I have an artistic daughter to whom I taught the lesson, and who can quickly detect when images have been altered, “did you notice she has no feet?”.
Transferring these skills to students is even harder. Between the time constraints and the continuous fight against the biases they bring to the classroom, convincing them of the value of analyzing each piece of media they see is a curriculum in itself. However, not only are the standards clear on this point (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.6 and CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.8), but we must also think about how our students will continue to interact with media beyond the walls of our classrooms. Active participation in a society requires citizens that are able to make truly informed decisions and form their own opinions. Just because an expert says it does not make it so, in the same way that seeing should not always be believing. I am reminded of a common saying among my students, “picture or it didn’t happen”, to which I’ve been known to reply, “but what if the picture has been altered?”.
As I continue to strive to develop these critical media analysis skills, I continue to find ways to include more opportunities to evaluate media and deconstruct messages within the resources I provide students. This is an ongoing process of refinement in both my students and myself, but in the end our whole society will reap the benefits.