Reflecting on Teaching and Un-Teaching Source Evaluation

I chose this article because I felt that it related pretty closely to the grand narratives article from last week. I particularly enjoy case studies, and I liked that this article was less theoretical and based more in the classroom. I think that it is super important for students to learn to question early in their academic career what they think about authority and reliable source. It was interesting to see what the students in this article thought about Wikipedia. I have only had one instructor point out that there are different tiers of reliability marked on Wikipedia articles, and it is helps to judge the reliability of the article. I also found it striking that 14% of students thought that just because they found the source through a university’s search function / scholarly database that it was a reliable source. One of the librarians that I observed pointed out to his students that academic articles are sometimes not reliable and are later retracted. This kind of thing is super useful for students to know, and I definitely plan to keep the concepts from this article in mind when teaching next semester.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *