Information Literacy, or How Do You Know Your Information Is Good?

[knitgrl]

Short background: A friend of mine wants to give us an old encyclopedia set which is probably 25-30 years old. I have been looking closely at History Odyssey Ancients for dd who will be in 5th grade next year, and it occurred to me that it might be handy to have an encyclopedia set around for that particular curriculum, as it assigns kids to write definitions and brief summaries of people, places and things. I think in this particular context, ancient history for a 5th grader, an old encyclopedia set works. It will be a tactile way for her to experience one way of organizing information. I'm not quite ready hand her over to the internet.

All this got me thinking about how to teach kids how to judge what information is reliable, and what isn't. I got a handful of tips when I went to college, but that was when Google was in its infancy and money talks a lot louder on search results than what it used to. What do you use to teach kids what is good information?

[knitgrl]

1 hour ago, OKBud said:

+1 for encyclopedias. 

Bump for the rest 🙂 

Thanks for the bump, OKBud!

I changed the title because maybe it looked too technical?

I think it is an interesting topic. I think it is a tremendously important topic. After all, it is one of the reasons I homeschool. I don't want my kids to swallow the 10,000 things the Internet and TV want to tell them, because a lot of it isn't true. Almost every first hit on a google search is a paid ad.

Since there was so little response, I did some poking around and found thebig6.org. It has a little bit of what I am looking for and a bunch of other stuff that I am not looking for, but I tend to shy away from programs that want you to take a workshop.

[Andromeda]

It is definitely an important topic, and it's great that you are looking for ways to teach your children information literacy skills.

At the grade 5 level, encyclopedia should still be ok, but you should prepare to move toward using primary sources and multiple types of information (print, online) as your students get older.

I am a university instructor, and many of my students struggle with this. At the college (and preferably high school) level, students need to understand that using an encyclopedia (or something like Wikipedia) is fine as a springboard or start for their paper or project but not as actual references. Encyclopedias are secondary sources - their information has been summarized and rewritten to fit the format of the text, and the quality of the information can vary widely from topic to topic within the same text, and it is not possible to identify individual authors or check their qualifications. There can also be multiple content errors. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are not acceptable sources in academic papers at the college level. Many of my students have never been told this, and they struggle to find academic sources. Academic search engines such as EBSCOHOST are not very user friendly, and students go back to Google, producing low quality work. Google Scholar is better, but many articles it lists require purchase or access through a higher ed institution.

To evaluate information, you can start by identifying the author and deciding whether or not they are qualified to provide information, how old the information is, and what types of bias the author may exhibit. In other words, you wouldn't want to trust a 20 year-old article about a medical condition that was written by a person with no medical training.

I don't have a curriculum to recommend as I teach this to my students by example using academic search engines, but I found a book that may be helpful. It appears to be a planning book for teachers, but it could perhaps help you get started. Purdue OWL Writing Lab is an excellent resource as well. It has some information on evaluating sources, too.

 

[Farrar]

Many of the resources I've seen for this are just too narrowly focused to get at some of the bigger issues I see around information in our information overload world. Like, some are focused specifically on academic issues, which can obscure a more casual ability to discern "good" information - after all, we can't realistically go through all the steps that are necessary (and should be!) for writing an academic paper when we just want to find something out for ourselves or even for a curriculum that asks students to look something up. But also, that's important to know too and to understand when you have to do it and why some sources are okay for casual checking (like Wikipedia or a physical encyclopedia) but not for an academic paper. Or, they're focused too narrowly on something like "fake news" or are focused only on "bias." Those things are important, but they don't address figuring out sources for other things, like science or history and my experience is that the "bias" stuff isn't great at helping kids see the difference between bias that disqualifies something as reliable and bias that is simply inevitable or advocacy bias but still reliable. Or they're focused just on fact vs. opinion. One of the problems I see with the "fact vs. opinion" stuff these days is that it's really become fact vs. opinion vs. incorrect facts or opinions stated as facts - which is not a simple thing that you can always identify through phrasing the way that fact vs. opinion quizzes want. Like, "Columbus sailed to prove the Earth was round," is stated like a fact, but is completely incorrect.

A lot of the things I see now seem to have the end goal of forcing students to think that NOTHING is trustworthy. Like, don't trust any fact or information or sources because they're all suspect. And while we should always have our brains turned on... it's too exhausting in such an information rich society to be fully fact checking everything. People have that as their jobs in the news and in academia and for publishers. I feel like we have to simultaneously teach students to be skeptics and question things and be willing to be proven wrong and all that... and teach them to, on a day to day basis, trust sources that they've chosen to be trustworthy and not overthink it. Because overthinking it leads to the Flat Earth Society.

We talk about this stuff and I've used some little resources and things at various times. But basically... if anyone knows of a comprehensive resource, I'd be curious to see it.

[Andromeda]

Like Farrar, I would like to see a comprehensive resource on this. I don't know if one exists, but if it does, it would be a great help to my students.

This topic is not easy to quantify or to put into a set of formulaic steps. A lot of learning happens through discussion and working through examples.

For instance, you could spend an entire semester studying just the American Revolution in the context of information literacy. 

You can start by reading a current U.S. textbook and identify sources (if possible), bias, credibility, and authority. Who wrote the textbook? Can we discern their political affiliation/worldview/motivation? What seems to be the underlying theme? How are the events presented? Who are the heroes and the villains and why?

Then you can read about the same events in a current British textbook and ask the same questions. Are the events leading up to the Revolution described in the same way? One British textbook I saw (can't remember which now) called it the American Rebellion. How would you interpret the narrative if you were a British student? What would the events mean to you if you were a public school student in, say, Mongolia, reading the same textbook?

Then you could spend some time reading history books - fiction and non-fiction written in different time periods since the Revolution to the present day that take place or describe the events. Apply the same types of questions about authority, bias, etc.

Then you could go into primary sources and read personal letters, newspaper articles, speeches, political cartoons published at the time on both sides of the Atlantic. What do these artifacts tell you about the people and the times they lived in? How did their worldview/political affiliation/bias shape their writing?

This would involve a great deal of reading, writing, and discussion, but I think it would improve a student's thinking skills as well as information literacy.

[knitgrl]

On 12/13/2018 at 8:39 AM, RosemaryAndThyme said:

At the grade 5 level, encyclopedia should still be ok, but you should prepare to move toward using primary sources and multiple types of information (print, online) as your students get older.

Excellent point. I would not hand a 10th grader an encyclopedia and say, "Have at it!"

I am a university instructor, and many of my students struggle with this. At the college (and preferably high school) level, students need to understand that using an encyclopedia (or something like Wikipedia) is fine as a springboard or start for their paper or project but not as actual references. Encyclopedias are secondary sources - their information has been summarized and rewritten to fit the format of the text, and the quality of the information can vary widely from topic to topic within the same text, and it is not possible to identify individual authors or check their qualifications. There can also be multiple content errors. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are not acceptable sources in academic papers at the college level. Many of my students have never been told this, and they struggle to find academic sources. Academic search engines such as EBSCOHOST are not very user friendly, and students go back to Google, producing low quality work. Google Scholar is better, but many articles it lists require purchase or access through a higher ed institution.

I asked our children's librarian if she ever did programs on information literacy. She said people told her she didn't need to because the schools cover that. Apparently, they are not doing a very good job of it. Somewhat ironically, while researching this topic, I ran across a site that was apparently geared towards teachers. It had an article touting the benefits of buying one's research papers from a particular website, and how you could pay more for higher quality papers.

 

 

 

[knitgrl]

I found something from New York State. There are three pdf's at the bottom of the page. I have not read all 466 pages of the first pdf, but in skimming it, it looks like there may be some useful things there. It's not a curriculum exactly, but does give an idea of what kids should know in grades K-12, as well as worksheets.

[Andromeda]

22 minutes ago, knitgrl said:

22 minutes ago, knitgrl said:

I asked our children's librarian if she ever did programs on information literacy. She said people told her she didn't need to because the schools cover that. Apparently, they are not doing a very good job of it. Somewhat ironically, while researching this topic, I ran across a site that was apparently geared towards teachers. It had an article touting the benefits of buying one's research papers from a particular website, and how you could pay more for higher quality papers.

 

 

That's funny (not really, but you know what I mean 😃). I don't catch everyone who cheats, but I do get quite a few. At times I know that a student plagiarized or cheated, but I can't prove it directly, and that can be frustrating. They often claim no knowledge of the cheat sites even when shown the matching text and link to the paper. I recognize my previous student papers, too.

This reminds me of this one student who uploaded his own paper (to sell) to one of these sites too early, meaning that it came up as a 100% match when I went to grade it, but it was actually his paper. Sometimes I can get the site to take down papers, but more appear far too quickly. 

Edited December 14, 2018 by RosemaryAndThyme

[Andromeda]

6 minutes ago, knitgrl said:

I found something from New York State. There are three pdf's at the bottom of the page. I have not read all 466 pages of the first pdf, but in skimming it, it looks like there may be some useful things there. It's not a curriculum exactly, but does give an idea of what kids should know in grades K-12, as well as worksheets.

 

This looks good! I scrolled down to the grade 8 (I think) worksheets, and they cover things like selecting sources, examining different views on the same topic made by different people, putting together time lines, cause/effect, and other ideas. Thank you for sharing!

[Farrar]

3 hours ago, knitgrl said:

I found something from New York State. There are three pdf's at the bottom of the page. I have not read all 466 pages of the first pdf, but in skimming it, it looks like there may be some useful things there. It's not a curriculum exactly, but does give an idea of what kids should know in grades K-12, as well as worksheets.

This sums up everything I loathe about reading through public school materials. 450+ pages and 90% of it is stating and restating the standards over and over again. Standards are useful and all in figuring out what to tackle when, but... from skimming, I don't see much useful in there for implementation, especially for past 6th grade or so. And for something like this, I feel like it's all implementation. It's easy for history to say, needs to know about these events and go from there to a lesson plan. For some of these skills, it's really big, abstract goals. Without a roadmap, it's not that useful, IMHO.

[nixpix5]

Primary sources and updated versions. Multiple sources from different viewpoints, and choosing authors who are experts in their field and respected. For example, we are covering the middle ages so I have an older text by someone who was one of the considered experts in his day on this historical time period. I read it myself as my children cannot. I read current research and watch quality documentaries, I even listen to college lecture series. In this way I can have a better grasp of what feels accurate and what doesn't as they read through their age appropriate books. I can say "hmmmm, I am not entirely sure that is accurate so let's see if we can find a separate source for that"

Obviously you cannot do this with everything perfectly, but just doing it sometimes shows your child that printed information may not be correct and should be read with some skepticism and further investigation. It grows responsible consumers of research and media.

[Farrar]

5 hours ago, nixpix5 said:

Primary sources and updated versions. Multiple sources from different viewpoints, and choosing authors who are experts in their field and respected. For example, we are covering the middle ages so I have an older text by someone who was one of the considered experts in his day on this historical time period. I read it myself as my children cannot. I read current research and watch quality documentaries, I even listen to college lecture series. In this way I can have a better grasp of what feels accurate and what doesn't as they read through their age appropriate books. I can say "hmmmm, I am not entirely sure that is accurate so let's see if we can find a separate source for that"

Obviously you cannot do this with everything perfectly, but just doing it sometimes shows your child that printed information may not be correct and should be read with some skepticism and further investigation. It grows responsible consumers of research and media.

I think that's the ideal... but I worry that when we teach this as the standard practice for getting information all the time that we're essentially setting young people up to fail. We're constantly bombarded with text and information and when you think you need to find half a dozen sources and trace something back to it's primary sources for every single thing you read... it's defeating and impossible. You'll never make it through anything. I think we need to teach kids to trust their textbooks and good overview sources and a few solid news sources... and teach them that when they really want to engage in scholarship they need to do those things. And, additionally, build up their background knowledge generally, because that's how you get a good bs detector going. And teach them about the backfire effect and how to be willing to be wrong when evidence is presented. And how to evaluate bias... I mean, it's so multifaceted.

[Farrar]

You know, one of the things that has started to guide me in my thinking about information and reliability is that 99%, especially with coupled with sources that are willing to update and apologize, is good enough. So news sources, textbooks, encyclopedias, etc. cannot be expected to be right all the time. They just can't. No source is infallible. All sources have bias. But we can't let it make us freeze up. We have to trust and move on - and be willing to get corrected later if need be. But unless we trust, we can't build our own sense of information.

[knitgrl]

15 hours ago, Farrar said:

I think that's the ideal... but I worry that when we teach this as the standard practice for getting information all the time that we're essentially setting young people up to fail. We're constantly bombarded with text and information and when you think you need to find half a dozen sources and trace something back to it's primary sources for every single thing you read... it's defeating and impossible. You'll never make it through anything. I think we need to teach kids to trust their textbooks and good overview sources and a few solid news sources... and teach them that when they really want to engage in scholarship they need to do those things. And, additionally, build up their background knowledge generally, because that's how you get a good bs detector going. And teach them about the backfire effect and how to be willing to be wrong when evidence is presented. And how to evaluate bias... I mean, it's so multifaceted.

This is so, so important. I am a history person, and dh is a science person, so we keep each other in check on the subjects in which we are less knowledgeable. Every now and then he will make a statement based on something he saw online (where he tends to hang out in technical circles) about some historical event and it is just totally wrong because he didn't know that x happened before, or y was happening simultaneously. Of course, I am corrected on science topics where my knowledge is a bit fuzzy. The fact is, we can't know everything. It was interesting a pp mentioned something about info that "feels accurate." Information can't "feel accurate" unless you have some background knowledge. Otherwise, you will just go along with whatever happens to align with your worldview, whether it is accurate or not.