Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

For almost 20 years, instruction librarians have relied on variations of two models, the CRAAP Test and SIFT, to teach students how to evaluate printed and web-based materials. Dramatic changes to the information ecosystem, however, present new challenges amid a flood of misinformation where algorithms lie beneath the surface of popular and library platforms collecting clicks and shaping content. When applied to increasingly connected networks, these existing evaluation heuristics have limited value. Drawing on our combined experience at community colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, and with Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research institute studying college students’ information practices for the past decade, this paper presents a new evaluative approach for teaching students to see information as the agent, rather than themselves. Opportunities and strategies are identified for evaluating the veracity of sources, first as students, leveraging the expertise they bring with them into the classroom, and then as lifelong learners in search of information they can trust and rely on.

Being able to critically evaluate information sources is a key digital literacy skill. With assignment time rapidly approaching, it’s important to make sure you know how to evaluate information before you reference it in your work.

You can use the memorable CRAAP checklist to get started

Information literacy skills top many lists of must-have abilities, especially in the age of fake news. Not all results in a Google search are legitimate–but how many of today’s students know this?

Children have access to devices at younger ages, which underscores the importance of teaching them how to look at news with a critical eye and to evaluate the information’s origin. Because today’s students are growing up in an age where information is easily accessed, they need to know how to apply critical evaluation skills when met with information purporting to be truthful.

For over two decades, librarians have been at the forefront of helping their patrons and students discern what online information is reliable, and what may be biased or outright false. Particularly as more formal information literacy programs developed at the college and university level (and the attendant inclusion of information literacy in many general education programs), academic librarians have developed curricula and taught students how to evaluate web sources for credibility. In many institutions, this has frequently been achieved via a “one-shot” session with a checklist of sorts, often some variation of the CRAAP Method (Currency, Reliability, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) developed nearly 15 years ago at California State University-Chico.

I reference the history of the so-called “checklist approaches” to online information literacy from time to time, but haven’t put the history down in any one place that’s easily linkable. So if you were waiting for a linkable history of CRAAP and RADCAB, complete with supporting links, pop open the champagne (Portland people, feel free to pop open your $50 bottle of barrel-aged beer). Today’s your lucky day.

With all the information they ever need right at their fingertips, it is imperative to teach students how to check their facts. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to know what is true and false, and students are struggling deciphering the truths from the falsehoods. According to Stanford University, their research “shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.”