Category: information literacy

TEaching information and media literacy - part of finding and checking information

Evaluating your own practice (educators) – finding and checking information

Assessing your own practice 

It is important to not only develop effective information literacy skills but also to assess how these can impact our own everyday work. Understanding how information literacy development can bring positive benefits to our pedagogies and to our classrooms is a critical step towards embedding this into our wider everyday professional practice.  

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checking information

One approach to this assessment is to utilise an information literacy framework to measure the range and depth of skills at use in a particular setting. Formal frameworks (such as the Media and Information Literacy Alliance’s model) essentially provide the conceptual tools to break down information literacy practice into its component parts, making it easier to measure and to explain what these mean in everyday practical terms.

Frameworks can help establish skill levels, competencies and awareness of information literacy practices in a wide variety of different learning environments and can be useful to both teachers (in understanding information literacy needs) and children and young people (in understanding where they may need assistance). They are often easy to use and can produce straightforward digestible outputs, uncover existing areas of strength and provide insight into ongoing development opportunities. 

Assessing information literacy skills in our own settings is therefore a crucial step towards developing targeted and sustainable critical thinking skills. Using an established information literacy framework to measure our work is therefore the best way to understand these needs and to embed good practice into our individual approaches to teaching. 

Evaluating information - part of finding and checking information

Evaluating information – finding and checking information

Evaluating information sources 

Here are a couple of ways children and young people can evaluate sources: 

  • Look for clues: Author (are they trustworthy?), Date (is the information still current?), Purpose (does the source inform, sell, persuade or entertain?) 
  • Strategy: SIFT – Stop, Investigate source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to original context. 

Children and young people should always remember to provide sources they use. As well as helping them find reliable information, it adds credibility to their work! 

 

 

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Spotting mis- and disinformation  

Children and young people should check whether any information, from any source, is reliable. While online sources, especially social media sources, are often suspected, even printed books can at least have biases.  

However, recent research has found that misinformation and disinformation are mostly about today’s socio-political matters.  

There are a host of techniques to check whether information is true but firstly children and young people need an attitude of constant vigilance. Only if they routinely suspect information they receive will they apply these techniques. 

 

Reliability-checking 

In addition to SIFT and Author – Date – Purpose, the following have also recently been recommended by school librarians: 

There are several other models listed on the CILIPS website here: https://www.cilips.org.uk/media-and-information-literacy-resources.  

In general, children and young people should check several sources, and where possible make sure they don’t all link back to the same original source. The gold standard reliable sources are those that have been peer-reviewed, that is checked by experts for accuracy, reliability, verifiability etc. Most academic journals are peer-reviewed, but they can be very costly to access. 

Fact-checking services 

In case it’s not possible for your students to check information, there are fact-checking services. These include:

trusted sources - part of finding and checking information

Trusted sources – finding and checking information

Trusted sources 

Children and young people should look for information that is reliable, accurate and credible. They should use sources that are transparent about their information, cite their evidence, and avoid bias or misinformation. This: 

  • is essential for learning accurate and reliable information 
  • develops critical thinking skills 
  • avoids spreading mis- or disinformation 
  • supports stronger research, better arguments and more meaningful conversations.  

 

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checking information

 

Examples of trusted sources include: 

 

 

* Note about Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org)

Wikipedia is a fantastic information tool for school pupils because it offers a vast, easily accessible starting point for research on almost any topic. It involves community verification and collaboration to ensure its sources are accurate (although pupils should double check sources where possible).  

Don’t rely on AI! 

It’s very tempting to rely on AI, especially the AI summaries that appear at the top of Google search results. However, these summaries do not state how they assessed the sources that they draw from. Worse, when researching during the preparation of this document, some Google AI summaries were based on sources that either weren’t related to what we were searching for or were suspect in other ways.

In short, AI currently isn’t fully reliable, and doesn’t help children and young people be sure of what they find. There is no substitute for searching several sources, and critically thinking about what is found.