As I said in my previous post, I am struggling to decide how to help my students acquire the skills they need to find "reliable" sources for their information needs. I put quotation marks around reliable because I'm still not sure if that is the correct word. Almost any source could be considered reliable depending on the information need. Would "appropriate" be a better? Suggestions anyone?
Mention of "information needs" leads me to think that this would be a good place to start in helping students to develop their research skills. What is the topic? What is the research question? What is required to answer the question or questions? Facts, statistics, opinions, maps, diagrams, academic articles, news articles, etc. I realise that this is an obvious starting place but I do wonder if teachers actually discuss it with their students.
Sunday 14 October 2018
Saturday 13 October 2018
Crap or is it CRAAP?
I go swimming several times a week. It is one of the elements of my exercise routine and more than riding my bike, I find that it affords me the opportunity to think through things, which are and have been bothering me. This morning I was pondering how crap my week had been when my mind wandered on to the question of CRAAP, the rubric used by many students, mainly at the prompting of their teachers, to ascertain whether or not an e-resource is 'reliable' or not. Funny how your mind can hop scotch around!
Earlier in the day, I had been reading Mike Caulfield's blog post on CRAAP so that was probably the catalyst. I wasn't entirely sold on this rubric before I read the article. In fact, I had welcomed another one done by Zakir Hussain. I added some ideas to it from Mike Caulfield and started using the end result instead of CRAAP.
Then, during the swim, I came to the realisation that it may all be a waste of time. Students generally pay little attention to the rubric when they are searching for sources. It would take too long. In fact, do you ever search the internet with a rubric by your side? Instead, they only look at it when a teacher asks them to justify the use of particular sources. By that time, it is too late. Students are past masters at being able to justify what they are using. Unless the teacher looks at each source to see whether or not the justifications are valid, they will never know whether the student was right or not. Would this be feasible for every student and every source? No, obviously not. So what is the answer?
I was at about lap 45 when I reached this point. Now I am at home, still pondering this dilemma. As long as we continue to include the justification of sources as part of the assessment of work, CRAAP and other such rubrics will continue to be used. However, their use is not necessarily going to improve our students' research skills and ability to recognise when a source is reliable, if that is the word I want.
Students need to be able to do what good researchers do. I count myself in that category, though I am still learning. Hence, this is my question now: what do I do and how did I learn to do it? It would be facile to say that I have all these years of experience when the skills I have developed in researching using the internet have developed only recently. Admittedly, I am building on skills I already had as a researcher but searching library catalogues and indexes is not the same.
How do I describe what I do when I look at a list of sources and recognise those I don't consider useful/reliable/whatever other words you want to use, and those which I want to investigate. Perhaps the question goes back even further in the process. Would it be better for me to start by asking how I identify what kinds of sources I need to find for a particular research task? There is also the question of whether or not all researchers follow the same path.
I feel as if I am about to plunge down the rabbit hole. Not a place I want to go on a warm, sunny autumn day.
Would you like to join in this conversation? Perhaps we could find some way to facilitate the discussion for I feel that this is going to be the direction of my musings for quite some time to come.
Earlier in the day, I had been reading Mike Caulfield's blog post on CRAAP so that was probably the catalyst. I wasn't entirely sold on this rubric before I read the article. In fact, I had welcomed another one done by Zakir Hussain. I added some ideas to it from Mike Caulfield and started using the end result instead of CRAAP.
Then, during the swim, I came to the realisation that it may all be a waste of time. Students generally pay little attention to the rubric when they are searching for sources. It would take too long. In fact, do you ever search the internet with a rubric by your side? Instead, they only look at it when a teacher asks them to justify the use of particular sources. By that time, it is too late. Students are past masters at being able to justify what they are using. Unless the teacher looks at each source to see whether or not the justifications are valid, they will never know whether the student was right or not. Would this be feasible for every student and every source? No, obviously not. So what is the answer?
I was at about lap 45 when I reached this point. Now I am at home, still pondering this dilemma. As long as we continue to include the justification of sources as part of the assessment of work, CRAAP and other such rubrics will continue to be used. However, their use is not necessarily going to improve our students' research skills and ability to recognise when a source is reliable, if that is the word I want.
Students need to be able to do what good researchers do. I count myself in that category, though I am still learning. Hence, this is my question now: what do I do and how did I learn to do it? It would be facile to say that I have all these years of experience when the skills I have developed in researching using the internet have developed only recently. Admittedly, I am building on skills I already had as a researcher but searching library catalogues and indexes is not the same.
How do I describe what I do when I look at a list of sources and recognise those I don't consider useful/reliable/whatever other words you want to use, and those which I want to investigate. Perhaps the question goes back even further in the process. Would it be better for me to start by asking how I identify what kinds of sources I need to find for a particular research task? There is also the question of whether or not all researchers follow the same path.
I feel as if I am about to plunge down the rabbit hole. Not a place I want to go on a warm, sunny autumn day.
Would you like to join in this conversation? Perhaps we could find some way to facilitate the discussion for I feel that this is going to be the direction of my musings for quite some time to come.
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