Online Resources: How to Evaluate With a Critical Evaluation Framework

Incorporating online resources into your practice and your scholarship is inevitable. Ensuring you use the most affective, accurate and credible resources is not automatic. Learning this skill is important and also sets an example to your students on what they need to be using in their own work. Adopting high standards when creating your own teaching material validates this process while it gives consistent examples to your students to follow. Teaching all your students these skills when they are young gives them skills they can transfer to other contexts weather it be research or just being a consumer of media.

Here is the University of Victoria (Inba Kehoe): Criteria for Evaluating Internet Resources

Fake news, deepfakes and Synthetic media swirl around the once trusted online sources where once legitimate information was the norm. Musgrove et. al. article recommended that librarians and faculty teach students to check questionable material with online fact checkers such as Snopes, FactCheck, Hoax-Slayer, or some other reputable fact-checking site. In doing so, students should be taught to consider the source of the information carefully with an ever critical eye. Teaching critical evaluation of material is a life skill used in contexts far beyond education.

One approach to using or teaching a critical evaluation is to adopt a framework such as CRAAP or RADAR. Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose (aka CRAAP) was devised at California State University, Chico in 2010. Cal State librarians created this test of sorts to provide questions to decide if a source is reliable. RADAR (Rationale, Authority, Date, Accuracy and Relevance) is a comparable framework offering many of the same suggestions (see below video for a deeper look). Following a critical evaluation framework such as these helps to student to remember what makes a good resource while also noting potential pitfalls. Coupled with showing tools to fact check and their own net savvy students should become better equipped to navigate current realities of the internet of today.

The University of Western Ontario created a Evaluating Sources site as well as the below video.

In your own searching for resources Illinois State University created a CRAAPTest-handout pdf which may aid your searching and potential be used as an instructional tool in your practice to give directly to your students. Fake or Fact?

PBS outlines spotting deepfakes with tips below. Deepfakes and other misinformation tactics are getting better and more believable, moving past novelty and into deception of fact.