The Art of Evaluation
RSSBy Gail Junion-Metz -- School Library Journal, 05/01/1998
Developing children's critical thinking skills depends on good teaching skills.
Most of you have probably visited Web sites that contain information that is unsubstantiated, uncited, and quite possibly untrue. It's crucial that you become an educated consumer of Web information and learn how to teach young surfers basic Web evaluation skills.
Proper Form
When teaching students how to evaluate Web sites, you'll need to establish evaluation criteria and create forms for them to use when doing assignments. (For a broader discussion of evaluation criteria, see "Sizing Up Sites: How to Judge What You Find on the Web," Ann K. Symons, SLJ, April 1997, pp. 22-25). Rather than starting from scratch, check out Kathy Schrock's Critical Evaluation Surveys page. Schrock is the District Technology Coordinator for Dennis-Yarmouth Regional Schools on Cape Cod. She has created three model forms for use in elementary, middle, and high schools. (Schrock also created the elementary form in Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese.) Now take a look at the Evaluation Rubrics for Web Sites page by Tammy Payton, Web Editor for Loogootee (IL) Community Schools. Payton's forms use numerical grading scales to determine evaluations. Last, visit the two CyberGuide Ratings pages designed for, and field-tested by, high school students. One page offers a model form for evaluating content and the other is for design. These pages were created by Karen McLachlan, Library Media Specialist at East Knox High School (OH).
Regular Exercise
The good news: there are some very good online evaluation exercises. The bad news: most were created for upper middle and high school students. But you should still look at these sites to glean ideas for creating your own online exercises for younger children. A good place to go is Hoax? Scholarly Research? Personal Opinion? You Decide!, a site created by Esther Grassian and Diane Zwermer of UCLA's College Library. This site provides links to other sites related to news, sports, current events, and movies, and asks questions about the accuracy, objectivity, and currency of each link. Next, visit Please Evaluate This Web Site, a site created by the California State University Information Competency Project. It works this way: When you go to the site two windows come up. The site that has been chosen for evaluation (currently a site created by a private individual about the joys of smoking) pops up in one window and a list of evaluation questions appears in the other. This format is not too hard to create using HTML. Last, take a look at Evaluating Internet Resources: a Checklist for Students, created by Ellen Berne, who is Director of the Library at the Windsor School in Boston. This site also offers a "Checklist for Librarians and Teachers," which advises educators to evaluate elements such as a site's uniqueness and information presentation in addition to its accuracy.
Professional Support
To save time when preparing an evaluation lesson, visit Ed's Oasis Evaluation Center, which is co-sponsored by AT&T and the International Society for Technology in Education. Here you'll find an annotated list of children's sites-ready-made examples of how to do site evaluations. You should also check out another Kathy Schrock creation, Critical Evaluation of a Web Page, which gives you an idea of how to create an evaluation lesson plan of your own. Finally, subscribe to the listserv Info-Quality-L and find out how other librarians and teachers are teaching evaluation skills.
Web Addresses
- Critical Evaluation Surveys
www.capecod.net/schrockguide/eval.htm - Evaluation Rubrics for Websites
www.siec.k12.in.us/~west/online/eval.htm - CyberGuide Ratings
www.cyberbee.com/guides.html - Hoax? Scholarly Research? Personal Opinion? You Decide!
www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/instruct/hoax/evlinfo.htm - Please Evaluate This Web Site
www.lib.calpoly.edu/infocomp/modules/05_evaluate/survey.html - Evaluating Internet Resources: a Checklist for Students
www.tiac.net/users/winlib/evalstud.htm (and /evalteac.htm) - Ed's Oasis-Evaluation Center
oasis.syr.edu/guidelines.html - Critical Evaluation of a Web Page
www.capecod.net/schrockguide/brush/brush.htm - Info-Quality-L (listserv)
To subscribe, send an e-mail message to majordomo@coombs.anu.edu.au. Do not specify a subject. Where you would write the message, type: subscribe info-quality-1.
