Citation Challenges

Tracking down missing information for a citation can be frustrating. Even though citation styles like MLA, Chicago and APA make allowances for missing information (e.g., no author, no date), many times all the information is available.
Tracking down elusive information takes some practice, careful scanning and investigative searching techniques.
For this reason, we created the Citation Challenge and Citation Assessment activities.

Citation Challenge offers three challenges of increasing complexity.

• The first level requires players to identify what information satisfies citation requirements. For example, what is the Author's name, the date of publication, the publisher, the Web page, etc.
• Level two is a live Internet search to locate information on an article on a NASA site. The player must locate the name of the author, date, etc. by scanning and browsing.
• Level three is another live search that awards extra points for inputting the missing information in MLA style.
• The whole package is an interactive companion to the Citation MicroModule on the 21cif.com site.

The Citation Assessment offers four levels of difficulty from beginner to advanced. The beginning levels require finding information on a web page with no further searching. The advanced levels require tracking down the original source of the information, using truncation to navigate to directories and metadata to determine last modified dates. Each level has two live searches. Players get a percentage score at the end and can print the results to hand in. We don't recommend using these activities as the basis for a grade. However, they do make good benchmarks for demonstrating skills and progress.