6. Give students guided practice judging credibility

Welcome to Part 6 and thanks for being here!

On this page we'll just explore the problem you see below; it's a big, intractable problem.

Problem: Students struggle to judge the credibility of sources.

You learned in Part 3 that students don't understand what we mean when we tell them to "use credible sources" unless we're extremely clear what we consider credible sources to be and we provide examples. But even when an effort is made to explain what credible sources are, judging credibility can be very challenging for students.  

In fact, so far nobody has figured out a foolproof way to teach students how to judge the credibility of sources. Several attempts have been made to create checklists of characteristics to look for, or a list of steps to follow – as you see in the examples below (CRAAP, RADAR, SIFT) – but none work perfectly in all situations, and sometimes these lists can be downright misleading. These lists can also be unrealistically time-consuming to work through.

Why is it so hard to teach students how to judge the credibility of sources? It's partly because times have changed. Those of us who are older and had a lot of exposure to print books, magazines, newspapers, and journals learned they have characteristics that make them easily distinguishable from each other, such as their size, cover art, type of paper, use of color, amount of advertising, etc. Those physical qualities also provided important information about the function, use, and even the credibility of the source. But, most of that information is lost in the electronic formats that students encounter today, so it's a lot harder for them to pick up on cues that indicate credibility. 

Also, recall from Part 2 that most students don't understand sources very well, nor can they recognize different types of sources. Obviously, that's going to negatively impact their ability to judge credibility. 

Another issue is that judging credibility is just really complicated. The table below gives you an idea of all the different factors that might come into play when making credibility judgements. Checklists like CRAAP, RADAR, and SIFT don't even begin to capture this complexity. 

When you look at this table, note that experts have lots of experience recognizing different sources and working with those sources, as well as experience recognizing the producers/publishers of sources, and expertise with the content in sources. That means experts can look at a source and quickly take in the factors that make it credible or not without even much conscious processing. But many of these factors are unknown to students or hard to judge!

So how do we teach students to judge the credibility of sources?

It might help if we consider how experts judge credibility versus how novices (like students) judge it, as this can shed light on the skills novices need to gain in order to become experts. 

For example, expert researchers know that scholarly sources are generally considered to be credible. It's certainly easy enough for an expert to pass that information along to their students, but it's not likely to be useful unless students can recognize a scholarly source when they see it, and many can't. 

So how is it that experts can so easily recognize scholarly sources and novices can't? Experts rely on a mix of cues such as the subject matter of the source, the writing style, and the type of source. But they also rely heavily on that second column in the table above. They have lots of stored knowledge of reputable publishers and names of specific, reputable publications in order to judge credibility – and not just for scholarly sources! They also draw on their stored knowledge of reputable popular sources to make judgements about credibility. 

Students don't yet have the names of reputable publishers, organizations, or publications stored away in their head. Until they do, they have to use alternative methods of assessing credibility – for example, they might:

These alternative techniques for assessing credibility are difficult skills to master and very time-consuming – if not unrealistic – for students to apply to each source they are using. 

Not only that, applying these techniques may not lead to a confident assessment that a source is credible. Plus, even when students judge a source to be credible, it may still contain low-quality or unreliable information! Judging credibility is like making a calculated bet, but bets don't always pay off. Students are uncomfortable with this ambiguity and easily discouraged by it.

How is Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services (RIS) team addressing this problem? 

The Information Literacy Basics tutorial (https://ac.nau.edu/lms-apps/self-enroll/447456) explains credible sources in Lesson 3 and provides tips on how to identify them. Following that, in Lesson 4 students get tips on how to evaluate the quality of a source. So students read about how to assess source credibility and/or quality and they see examples. Take a look at the content to see what students are learning! Of course, just reading the tutorial and getting a single dose of exposure to judging credibility is not enough. Students need lots of practice judging credibility with lots of feedback from experts so they get a feel for how to do it. That's where you can help! 

How can YOU help address this problem? 

Judging credibility is hard to teach and hard to learn, but students won't get better at it without guided practice and opportunities to watch how experts (like you) assess the credibility of sources. Modelling the process for students will help them develop a knack for it. We also need to show them it's ok to live with some ambiguity – and it's even ok to give up on assessing a source for credibility and just move on to a different source that's easier to assess.  

Also, consider this – if we restrict students to just using scholarly and/or peer-reviewed sources, they'll never learn how to assess the credibility of information they find on websites and social media. Students won't learn to be skeptical of mis/disinformation they find on the internet if they don't have opportunities to see how experts (like you) evaluate and react to spurious information. 

Use the assignment ideas below to give students practice judging credibility, but also be transparent with students about the expert/novice gap in making credibility judgements – and how nobody knows what to do about this gap! Show students how you would assess the credibility of various sources, but also ask them how they would go about doing it. That will foster a discussion about how to bridge the gap between novice and expert. 

Regarding these assignment ideas:

Comment on this content and/or collaborate with NAU librarians to find other solutions to these problems!

The content on this page is a work in progress and we'd love to improve it! Cline Library's Research and Instruction Services team is interested to hear any comments or suggestions you have on the content presented on this page, or your ideas for other solutions. Also, if you've already created assignments that address these issues, or you have ideas for assignments that would help address these issues, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us!