Knowledge of Your Own Making
Use Sources
Thinking/Creating--Transform what you learn from others into knowledge of your own making
Reading/Understanding--Read, view, interpret, analyze, and critique material from sources to construct your answer to the question
Writing/Sharing--Compose, produce, revise and present your answers and learning to others as a disciplined contribution to knowledge
Criteria for Evaluating
Criteria for Evaluating
- Usefulness/relevance
- Is it about my topic?
- Can this teach me something new?
- Will this make my presentation better?
- Timeliness/currency
- When was the source published/posted?
- Does this present the current understanding of your topic? (Information in some topic areas becomes outdated more quickly than others).
- Is your topic historical, requiring older sources?
- Appropriateness/audience
- Who is the source written for?
- Who is your presentation geared for?
- What types of sources does your professor want you to have? (Some disciplines such as History and Law rely heavily on primary sources.)
- Authority/credibility
- Does it have a reference list/bibliography?
- Who published it?
- What are the author's credentials?
- Is it scholarly/peer reviewed?
- What is the bias? Does it promote a particular point of view?
- Does the author show evidence of critical thinking?
Take this list of criteria and evaluate your sources. If you're doing this for a class, you'll need to complete each of the following sections on evaluating:
