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Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning (Chicago: American library Association, 1998) should be in widespread use in library media centers throughout the nation by now. The nine information literacy standards contained in this important document provide guidance in teaching one of the most important skills that students should gain from modern education.
This article focuses strictly upon the second standard, one that is at the heart of information literacy. "The student who is information literate evaluates information critically and competently."1 Students may know how to access and locate, interpret, and apply information. However, if they do not invest any time in evaluating the information they use, their efforts often result in a low-quality product. Worse, failure to evaluate may result in unfavorable outcomes due to bad decision making based on flawed information.
Unfortunately, evaluating information is not a simple task. Many studies from the psychology, social psychology, and decision-making research areas demonstrate that it is extremely complex. Evaluation consists of a number of component processes and is influenced by a host of contextual factors. For example, the simple act of reading a newspaper article may involve some or all of the following:
* Which newspaper does the article appear in, and how credible is this newspaper?
* What is the reader's original opinion about the topic discussed in the article?
* Is this the first time the reader has encountered the topic, or is the reader quite familiar with it?
* What kind of mood is the reader in?
* What kind of writing style did the author use?
* How long is the article?
* What other articles and advertisements appear on the same page as the article?
* Who is the author, what are the author's credentials, and what opinion does the reader have about the author?
* What evidence does the author present to support the major points of the article? Is this evidence valid in the reader's eyes?
This list could be much longer. Each question touches upon a component of evaluation shown in controlled academic studies to affect the research process.
So how do we teach students to perform this complicated operation? Experience with children and adolescents should convince any educator that simply directing a fifth-grader to evaluate a newspaper...