Students are divided into small groups and each group is given a different aspect of a research topic/topic sentence for a specific paragraph in an essay. They have to find and present specific evidence from the reading material/other secondary source that directly supports the assigned aspect/topic sentence. In a class discussion, each group must briefly justify why they chose the evidence they did. 

Small groups of students should be given a central thesis statement and asked to create a diagram that maps out how different pieces of evidence from the reading material/other research sources directly support the thesis. This visual representation helps students see the relationships between the evidence and argument. 

Students sit in groups of 3 and go through 3 rounds where they take turns to play one of the prosecutors and the defendant. The writer (defendant) brings out the principal claims and the evidence that supports them for the prosecutors to evaluate, and in the course of the role play, each writer discovers the strengths and weaknesses of their selected evidence. [This could also be done via Google Docs as homework. If Google Docs is used in class, however, students tend to just type their responses without any/much conversation with the rest of the group.] 

When students use a source, they often just summarize the source rather than leveraging the source to support their own argument. For instance, they may read a research paper and they could use an example in the research paper for their argument but they are not sure how to do that. The instructor can bring a short article to class, share it with the students [this could also be done before class so that students have time to read the content], and then do a brief demonstration of the different ways in which the source could be used in a paper. Students could then work with a classmate and brainstorm ways collaboratively on how to use a specific source in their own papers without just summarizing the content. 

To enable students to differentiate between credible sources and ineffectual ones, instructors should give students examples of fake news or different fallacious claims employing various fallacies and have students in small groups pick them apart. For example, “Every ingredient of this meal is tasty. So this must be a very tasty meal.”