Teaching Activities: Evaluating Sources

I have two simple but I think fairly effective activities I do in my "Writing and Research" classes. A key part of these classes is less the writing itself per se and more teaching the students how to consider sources. A bit point of emphasis for me is to try to teach the students not just what they should be doing, but what principles underlie it. With that in mind, I have two things I do every semester.

Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

I use Craft of Research from University of Chicago Press in my research class. One of the things I like about it is that it make a distinction between "secondary" and "tertiary" sources—secondary sources are by scholars aimed at scholars, tertiary sources have a more general audience and don't communicate original research, and, perhaps most importantly, go through peer review. Good examples would be textbooks, web sites with general readerships, encyclopedias, and so on. I don't think people always make this distinction, but it helps drive students to what you kinds of sources you want.

I also like to emphasize that we approach primary sources differently than other sources: a TikTok video about how the COVID vaccine will kill you but at least you'll get into heaven is certainly not a secondary source, and for a project about vaccines would be a terrible tertiary source, but for a project about vaccine hesitancy would be an excellent primary source.

Once I teach this, I give the students some grids of sources, and I have them evaluate if they are primary, secondary, or tertiary. These are all based on real student projects I have received. I start easy, but I throw in some curveballs, and we talk through how in many cases, the tertiary sources were good sources in that there was no better source for the information out there.

Source Reliability 

This is just half of them!

Another thing I like in Craft of Research is its discussion of how to evaluate sources for reliability. It gives you a series of questions to ask: is the source by a reputable press? is it by a reputable scholar? how current is it? does it have notes and bibliography? how many people have cited it?

I like to concretize this by bringing in a bag of actual books from my office. I break the class up into pairs and give each pair three books. (It's a hefty bag!) We then work through the questions one by one, with me explaining what they mean and then having them apply them to their three books. It's simple enough, but I like the hands-on aspect of it, with them looking at copyright pages and author blurbs and flipping through looking for footnotes and such. Again, I try to highlight potential issues: sure, this person doesn't have a Ph.D. or an academic appointment and their book was published by a trade press, but they're a science fiction author and their book about science fiction has a detailed bibliography, so maybe we can trust it anyway... although it came out forty years ago, so maybe there's a better option!