Evaluation Tutorials

For a limited time, try our Evaluation Challenges without a subscription!

Evaluation Challenges focus on three key aspects of evaluating digital content:

1. Identity--who is the author or publisher?
2. Freshness--how recent is the information?
3. Accuracy--to what extent are the 'facts' supported by evidence?

Each of the 10 tutorials in this module is interactive, giving feedback to user responses, and hints as needed.

If encouraging students to evaluate what they read online is important to you, assign these as homework or work through them in class, one or two a day.

https://21cif.com///tutorials/challenge/evaluate/

Elementary Workshop Refreshed

Especially for those who teach younger students, the Elementary Workshop is a user-guided resource that may be used to introduce and reinforce concepts and skills in information fluency in the elementary grades.

An assortment of hands-on learning activities and games, with and without computers, is included in the workshop:

Speculative Searching

• ways to search
• queries
• homing in
• search challenges

Investigative Searching

• find the author
• find the date
• fact checking

Citing the Source

There's enough material to insert into mini-lessons throughout the school year. Check it out here: https://21cif.com/rkitp/course/elementaryworkshop/index.php

Information Researcher is up and running

 

A refresh of Information Researcher is now available. This assessment and tutorial package identifies weaknesses and strengthens skills in information fluency.

The subscription package consists of a six item Pretest, followed by a 9 unit set of interactive tutorials on all information fluency skills. A ten item Certification Exam concludes the learning experience. This was originally developed for the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University and has been revised based on user feedback.

A free preview of the Tutorials is available here.

To test your information fluency skills, try the Three Free Search Challenges, adapted from the Pretest.

Evaluation Method: Authorship

Other than the personal sniff test, which can be tainted by subjectivity, savvy searchers have other means at their disposal to determine if news may be fake or not.

One of these methods involves investigating the AUTHOR of the work in question. Schools that subscribe to Information Fluency have access to WSI - Website investigator, five cases for students to test their evaluation skills. To assist students, a series of tutorials are provided. Today's free preview is the WSI Authorship Tutorial: Finding and Evaluating an Author.

For more information on an annual subscription, see the Benefits of Membership.

If your school is already using WSI, we'd love to hear how you integrate it with other instruction and what students are discovering.

Re-release of Author Tutorial

Another refreshed tutorial is now available on 21cif:  Author


Author is the first in our series of Evaluation tutorials. Earlier last month we re-released Publisher. In the coming weeks expect to see two more: Date Checking and Back Link Checking.

If you want to try the Author module in a non-flash format, we just completed a revision.

There are three sections to the tutorial:

Practice the skills: to help novices, there are some practice exercises that introduce methods to solve the challenges in the tutorial. These focus on fact checking queries, truncation and browsing.
Find the Author: four challenges of increasing difficulty to identify the author of a page or site.
Investigate the Author: using clues on the site and external sites to determine if the author has a good, poor or unknown reputation. There are three of these challenges.

Try it out!  Tutorials may be completed in as little as a few minutes by individuals or extended into a classroom activity if desired. The final page may be printed and turned in if you want to see how students fared.

Start the tutorial

Elementary Fluency

I've been asked by a program director at Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development to think about creating online tutorials and assessments for students in grades 3 - 5. 

This is a challenging project: what do students in elementary grades need to know, what skills should they possess to prepare them for middle school information fluency?

A couple years ago I created an elementary workshop to address these needs. That workshop may be found here. 

Creating a bridge that builds on those ideas and connects with Information Investigator 3.0 and 3.1 could make an interesting project. Information Investigator 3.x represents our latest thinking about information skills that middle school and high school should possess.  There is surprisingly little difference between the capabilities of middle school and high school students. I'll outline that in an upcoming report based on a study of over 900 students conducted this summer.

If you are interested in having conversations about materials and activities that position learners in elementary grades to be more fluent upon entering middle school, I'd like to work with you. 

Let me know if you are interested!  We will move the conversation to CoolHub.IMSA where we develop projects like this. Email me directly at carl@21cif.com.