Asking Crucial Questions

Source evaluation can be a very complex topic for students, especially undergraduates. The gray area of whether a source is useful or whether you can trust it has become grayer and grayer over time, with the advent of accessing most of our information online. Checklists, like CRAAP, RADAR, and SIFT, are designed to help students navigate this gray area and are very commonly used across library instruction sessions.

For me, though, the simplification afforded by this checklist approach misses a lot of the nuance. So, instead of relying on a specific checklist, I follow an approach I call asking crucial questions. What do you need to know about this source to consider using it? What about this source is appealing to you? Below are some selections from these questions I ask, which I hope get at some of the gray area around source evaluation without being too complex.

Setting the context

In these questions, I ask my students to consider some meta questions about the source itself before they dive into reading it. These questions are partially adapted from the IF I APPLY method for source evaluation, in particular the opening questions, which ask students to consider their own knowledge before they engage with a source.

1. What do you already know about this topic?

2. What do you still need to know?

Who, when, why

Taking some inspiration from many source evaluation frameworks, including RADAR and SIFT, I then ask students to delve into reading the source and think through some key questions about its reliability. These questions were designed to emphasize the gray area that is at the heart of source evaluation: what you need to know or do to evaluate reliability can vary quite significantly by context.

1. When was this source published? Can you find anything newer that will give you the same type of information?

2. Consider what you hope to learn from this source. Can you trust that the information here is up-to-date enough to learn that information?

3. What knowledge about this topic does the author have?

   1. I also identify some sources of expertise here: academic experience, professional experience, and lived experience.

4. Summarize the argument/main ideas of this article. Does their main idea add to or take away from your trust that this is the right source for you?

5. Google the author and publication. Do you notice a particular agenda or bias? How does that affect your trust level?

Relevance and usefulness

Another major concept I try to reinforce when I teach about source evaluation is the idea of relevance or usefulness. These questions are inspired by the BEAM method, which asks about the ways in which a source will be used as a way to determine their reliability.

1. Now that you’ve read this source, what did you learn from it that helped you understand your topic better?

2. What might your audience need to learn from this source to help them understand what you’re writing about?

3. When you think about the other sources you’ve found, does this contribute in a way that reinforces those other sources? Contradicts them?

Embracing the blob

In an information landscape that prioritizes shorter and shorter content with less and less nuance, something I try to do in my instruction is encourage my audience to slow down and embrace the nuance. This method of teaching source evaluation certainly isn’t as easy or as snappy as a checklist, but it does provide a framework, I think, for that more honest conversation that sources aren’t black and white. No source is only good or bad, but in so many ways it depends on your purpose.

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