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

  1. Usefulness/relevance
    • Is it about my topic?
    • Can this teach me something new?
    • Will this make my presentation better?
  2. 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 (Information in some topic areas becomes outdated more quickly than others).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?
  3. 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.)
  4. 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:

Books
Articles
Websites