This fall we had the odd experience of orienting the 7th graders to our physical library – giving them the introduction they would have had when they entered the school as 6s had we not been…well, you know. Since we already knew each other somewhat, I had more chance to observe over students’ shoulders as they pursued our “get to know the library” scavenger hunt, which is how I had the opportunity to watch several students search Destiny for [ books about birds ] and come away quite frustrated, telling us we did not have any bird books in the collection.

Very fortunately, the 7th grade dean was able to arrange for an hour for them to learn how search works (which I rarely get to teach anymore) and – when it became clear that the grade-level work they would be doing during our January intersession would revolve around finding “personal narratives” relating to “indigenous peoples and climate change” I was able to get another hour with them. During that class I tried out a lesson plan I’ve been wanting to test drive for more than a decade.

I’m not sure I have ever had two full hours just to teach students about the functioning of search tools and then the functioning of human expression in interaction with the search tools. As usual, I’ll share what I did here in the spirit of asking for feedback or thoughts so that (hoped for) future iterations can be smoother.

The first lesson: How search works

Thanks to the hard work and feedback of my wonderful Research TAs, I was able to pull together a lesson that demonstrates how search tools actually locate information and that involved lots of cat memes. Memes are great for search activities because they have so few words on them – and none of the words is actually “meme.”

The lesson objectives were to:

• Understand that search tools crawl individual sources and index the words on each page.
• Use a model index to locate physical sources.
• Create a search query that will find what you need when you are working with a limited index.
• Practice rudimentary imagining of sources.

Since I was running this class in one room, while three colleagues (with assistance from my TAs) were running it simultaneously in other rooms, I made both slides and a step-by-step script. There were activities building up to it, but the core of the lesson was pairs of students working together: one was the “searcher,” the other was the “computer.”

The “searcher” got a secret prompt and empty “search boxes” to fill out. The “computer” who – like our real computers – had no earthly idea of the context for the words written in the search box, had this very simple index to work with (but could not show it to the “searcher”). The computer also had small black-and-white printouts of eight cats-are-liquid memes, numbered 1-8 to correspond to the index. They could only see the number assigned each meme, not the meme itself. The “computer” could only return “no results” or a meme identified by the index. Looking at the “searches” on the left and the index on the right, one of the original searches, [french scientist cat memes] must have returned zero results, as three of the search terms do not even appear in the index. However, [cats are liquid] found two memes (numbered 6 and 8) and [cat liquid] found numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 …  the “searcher” just kept trying until they got a meme result. Then, of course, each pair joyously looked at all eight possible memes and identified why the “computer” had been unable to “find” so many of them (because, of course, they said things like: “Liquid mode activated,” and so could not even be found if the searcher used the word [ cat ] in their query. 

We solidified this understanding by looking at actual search results and highlighting where our search terms showed up – proving that the words we typed in were the ones that search tools were identifying to bring back our results:

The second lesson: How language made by humans works

My room got very engaged with the lesson, though I had my usual doubts about if it was all about the memes, or if anything actually stuck. Thus, I was very pleasantly surprised when – two months later – students did retain the big points of the lesson (ok, admittedly, a number of students in the class were individually able to help compile a list of points):

For the follow-up lesson I had a harder ask: teach students how to translate the idea of “personal narratives” (a term both students and teachers love) into functional search terms. 

Often, when personal narratives are desired, I teach (older) students to look for [ oral history ] a wonderful context term that has the distinct advantage of describing collections of personal narratives. However, when looking for narratives from individuals from various indigenous communities around the world – particularly on the topic of climate change – we needed a different strategy entirely. I had learned from many years on a project we do with the ninth graders that individuals’ anecdotes that put a human face on “issues” like climate change often appear at the start of newspaper articles and in other, similar formats. My job became teaching the seventh graders to imagine search strategies and search terms to find these types of sources. 

This time, I had the whole 64-person grade in the library at once, and slides were once again in order. We considered the whole range of strategies for finding personal narratives, and trust me that the first two made for a lot of student chatter and example-sharing:

We discussed searching in YouTube for their subject’s name (solution 3A), searching for terms like [ interview ] or [ transcript ] (solution 3B), and then I took a risk and tried a method I had wanted to undertake for years. I handed out excerpts from sources that offered stories from individual’s lives (such as this article or this one or this one), selecting the portion of the source that indicated that such a narrative was about to appear. Once again, I had them read, observe, and highlight. If an article did not use the words “personal narrative,” what words might it use?

Their observations were just phenomenal!

(BTW: Forgot to say before that my personal favorite way to search for these narratives might look like this: [ farm OR livestock she OR hers OR he OR his OR me OR my OR our OR ours OR them OR they ] and this one when I need life-background information [ farm OR livestock “as a child” ].)

Once again, I am not sure every student got the idea I was going after, but I have rarely seen as many hands in the air and I actually had to cut them off so we could continue with the lesson (which was using Boolean in Google-form and in database-form to try to look for more personal narratives using these terms). We were in the middle of their final project for the year, writing Simple English Wikipedia pages for notable female-identifying individuals. While we would not use personal narratives for writing Wikipedia pages (they are not acceptable by Wikipedia’s source quality standards), the students were pretty excited about their subjects so we used them for search examples. 

I will have to see how their work goes during intersession (which will be virtual and for which I will be assigned to a different grade level), but this series of lessons did appear to offer heartening outcomes.

It was an excellent reminder to me: it is almost never a waste of time to give most of your time to the very, very basic building blocks students need to do research right.

This past week, I was fortunate enough to spend four days “attending” the International Fact-Checking Network’s eighth annual conference. It was compelling and eye-opening!

Many of the discussions really could have been taking place at a school library conference: questioning how to better teach media literacy, grappling to understand why mistrust in journalism and fact-checking is so high, wrestling with necessary relationships with certain corporations to maintain funding and access without letting those companies set the global fact-checking agenda, and discussing how to do more work with less money. Other topics, like the massive mental toll of both spending your days lurking on lists that are promoting misinformation and possibly worse, and harassment ranging from insulting comments to imprisonment to death threats made or carried out, are elements I am deeply grateful are much less a part of our work lives.

I’ve been noodling on what to share with you all, but also suffering a bit from screen fatigue. Furthermore, I neither want to simply hand out the intellectual property of these individuals who work so hard to find and share what is true, and I want to be thoughtful about naming individuals who are already suffering from harassment.

Due to our very similar fields and goals, however, I am in contact with the IFCN about how our professions might work together — so stay tuned for more (and keep your fingers crossed).

A few, random hot tips, though:

1. The preponderance of research suggests that educating people to recognize misinformation (“prebunking” or “inoculation”) is much more effective than trying to debunk misinformation in the moment.
2. TickToc is by far fact checkers’ favorite tool for prebunking education about how algorithms work, since they say (sorry, I have to take their word for it!) it is so very, very clear what the algorithm is doing within that social network.
3. Fact-checking videos is the hardest, YouTube is not interested in transparency, collaboration or funding fact-checking, and their algorithm very decisively recommends videos that blatantly run afoul of their takedown policy but are up and running and being promoted.
4. In many countries, the national statistics agencies are run by political appointees. And the resulting statistics may be re-tabulated and/or deleted by subsequent administrations. May be whole different agencies, as well.
5. The absolute best video for teaching the technicalities of researching if a video is real or a deep fake is this aerobics class. (Reach out if you want more about doing so — don’t want to just share out someone else’s lesson, but here is the actual fact-check on the video.)

In the meantime, at the risk of giving you just a list of resources, I would like to share a slightly annotated … list of resources. The following are some of the most compelling reports, slide decks, and videos that were shared over the course of the conference:

Some context on US situation from the American Press Institute:
*Report: A new way of looking at trust in media: Do Americans share journalism’s core values?
—Slides – not from this talk, but much of the same content in shorter form
*Also check out:
–2016 Report: A new understanding: What makes people trust and rely on news
–2018 Report: Americans and the News Media: What they do — and don’t — understand about each other

Sponsors of the conference: International Fact-Checking Network – Poynter
*IFCN Code of Principles
*International Fact-Checking Network YouTube Channel — lots of great content!
–Including: Fact-checking in school: Best practices from around the world (I have not watched this yet, but I did see some of these speakers on other, related topics)
*MediaWise – Poynter – they have a teen fact-checking group

Verification Handbook – a detailed primer by a number of strong professionals in the field.

Inoculation Theory – one researcher argued there is the most evidence that this is the most effective, others have supported the approach in their talks. One paper, as an example. A field that can really guide us in thinking about the most impactful use of our limited time with students.

First Draft News
*A guide to prebunking: a promising way to inoculate against misinformation
*The psychology of misinformation
*Many other useful reports – worth a look!

Global Trends in Fact-Checking: A Data-Driven Analysis of ClaimReview by Thomas Van Damme
*Data visualizations
*Thesis

Why Gendered Disinformation — #SHEPERSISTED – Explains the issue of gendered disinformation that targets female politicians, etc.

Lead Stories – has a “red feed” and a “blue feed” and is clearly run by a beloved and respected member of the fact checking community

Disinformation for Export: how false content generated in the United States reaches Latin America

YouTube Regrets – how YouTube algorithm surfaces and recommends misinformation
*Press release for shorter read

A typology of caveats (from FullFact) – We’re continuing to investigate the type of contextual information that statistics need in order to be meaningful and used correctly.

INFODEMIC COVID-19 IN EUROPE: A VISUAL ANALYSIS OF DISINFORMATION

Is it a Marvel film or a fact-checking newsroom? How Maldita.es uses its readers’ ‘superpowers’
This reminds me of some programs that could be built on preexisting TA programs, etc. in schools

A framework for information incidents – exploring how fact checking organizations should best respond in different incidents that can give rise to misinformation

GlobalFact 8 talk – Why good national statistics are so important for fact checkers – 2021-10-12
Gives insight into why it is so hard to use different country’s statistical data

Fact-Checking – Duke school of journalism

A comparison of reverse image search tools – has a handy summary chart if you scroll down

Weaponizing fact-checking: What Canada needs to know

https://fcl.eun.org/facts4all: The Facts4All – Schools as community hubs against disinformation is a one year project co-funded by the European Commission’s Media Literacy for All Programme project, which aims to increase awareness and critical thinking in relation to online disinformation across generations – in particular young people and their (grand)parents. — There is a MOOC

Headlines Network – Drive conversations towards improving mental health in the media and communications industries.

It has been just over a year since I emailed the AISL list, looking for a truly representational news database aimed at the K-12 market. The push for such a product is ongoing, and I hope to be able to update you more on that process soon (and please contact me if you would like to get involved in the campaign to drive change).

In the meantime, our library decided to assure that students would see themselves and each other in our digital resources, even if it did require accessing multiple databases to do so.

Having a larger number of databases is a challenge, as we all know, and we need to take a multi-pronged approach to ease adoption. Among our strategies are:

1. Recruiting student “Database Ambassadors.” Our students have grade-wide, homework-related group texts and so the Ambassadors will be on the scene when homework is hard to complete. They will remind classmates to reach out to librarians for help. I set out to have a few ambassadors in each grade, but students started asking if they could join the cadre and fully 10% of our 8th-12th grade students have asked to volunteer for this project.

Training starts today, and I am trying to figure out the few ideas I have to drive home. No use trying to familiarize them with a substantial number of databases during a study hall! My Research TAs tell me that the bare bones of the class I taught our Juniors are a critical part of the lesson….

2. The lesson/lecture for all 11th grade US History classes was an introduction to working with primary sources. The theme was “database business models as systemic injustice.” Some colleagues have asked me to share the slides from that class. Though they are not at all pretty, you can find them here. Honestly, I never thought to get emails with words like “moving” and “fascinating” related to a database lesson!

To be frank: none of the systemic issues with databases were news to students who have aspects of their identity that have been minoritized. It has been painful for me to realize of the substantial number of students who have felt alienated by our collection for so long.

Nonetheless, we move forward with anticipation. We believe that our students can both thrive on our more inclusive collection and simultaneously look at it with a critical eye. It is our job to help them do so.

If such a lesson feels like a bit more than you can bite off, check out Rebecca Hall’s graphic novel, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. Actually, read it whatever the case. In addition to history I never learned, it talks about silences in sources and how they impact our understanding of historical events.

Have a lovely week!

NOTE: This database work is a group effort that currently involves Sarah Levin (Urban School), Alea Stokes (Thayer Academy), and Sara Kelley-Mudie (Beaver Day School). Also, my awesome Library Director, Jole Seroff, who is supporting this work as an integral part of the program we provide our school. I’m just the only one who cannot stop talking about it. It is how I roll. 😉

For those of you who know me, you are about to experience a thing I never thought would happen: I am not in a mood to think, write, or talk about research. I am sure this state is temporary, and I did have a plan for this post, but I am fortunate enough to be someplace where I spent many happy hours in childhood, so I’ll share the images that inspire me at the moment (though it may not be scientifically correct):

Be like these eagles…

…when you find a place with a good view….

… stop and enjoy it.

Promise to have library-related content next time, but for now … wishing you joy however you find it.

Honestly, I have infographics on the brain right now. Welcome.

This year has been surprisingly busy and fulfilling on the instructional front, though nothing like past years or on almost any expected topics. I was thrilled, then, when our wonderful 7th grade History teacher reached out to ask me to help her wrap up the year with a lengthy infographics project we usually do in November.

Initially, when this collaboration began nine years ago (and before I came to this school, and shepherded by the wonderful Jole Seroff), the idea was to follow the unit on African empires with a look at positive aspects of life in African countries today. Time has taught us, sadly, that statistics do not give rise to seventh graders focusing on encouraging analysis. The project has endured nonetheless and continues morphing in the way good collaborations can sometimes do.

The way we teach this unit has streamlined over the years to make it easier for students, though it might have a bit of a fools rush in… aspect to it, as well. I’ll admit my desire to refresh it each year makes for a tremendous amount of work for me. It is also a big leap for students, and asks them to embrace some really new ways of thinking. But it is worth the growing pains — while high school students look back on it with some exaggerated shudders, there also exists some great love, and a handful of skills for which they voice deep appreciation in those later years.

Overall, I would argue that this is a process-based project: if you look at the final infographics they don’t tell the actual story. The insights offered in student presentations are much more telling. And the conversations we have over the course of this unit are varied and deep: Can we use data from different years in different graphs? Why doesn’t Rwanda have statistical data on prevalence of certain genetic diseases within its population the way the US does? Why doesn’t the US have an official literacy rate the way other countries do? Can we trust China’s numbers on incarceration? Explain that GDP thing again? What is “primary education”? This year brings: My hypothesis is that Russia has fewer women in prison than the US, but all my data shows that predictors of imprisonment are higher in Russia…. Do I need to change my thesis? (So many interesting conversations there.) And, hearing a roomful of seventh graders recommending that a classmate use “per capita” data in her graph instead of gross numbers, and explaining why… well, it is certainly a high point in my time as an educator.

This project has a lot of quirky methods and rules that have developed over the years, but they seem to help us get the project running smoothly. I’ve outlined the 3-4 week lesson plan below, for those who want to dig in. As always, very open to feedback and suggestions! Would love to hear in the comments if you do infographics or other data projects and what your objectives are.

Library’s data literacy objectives:
1. Develop a sense for the kinds of topics on which official statistics are collected and some of the specialized language used by statisticians.
2. Understand the difference between description and interpretation of a visualization. Be able to identify and produce both.
3. Understand that different visualizations are good for different types of data. Be able to select/produce the right kind.
4. Understand that evidence does not always have your topic mentioned in it. Broaden individual understanding of what can count as evidence.

Day 1:
1. What is an infographic? (Slides 1-2)
2. Virtual gallery walk of good and bad infographics (This year, rest of slides; most years we have a lot of infographics we hang around the room for the gallery walk.)
A. Have students list characteristics they see of different infographics, and then keep track of every time they saw that characteristic used, categorizing them into:
i. thesis, evidence, graphs, and design and
ii. helpful or unhelpful
B. Build class rubric (adapts to project rubric)

Day 2:
1. Look at different data visualizations, discuss the difference between description and interpretation of a visualization. Practice with the Banana Timeline.
A. Students start at their assigned slide and follow directions on slide 10.
i.Interpretation: This graph shows THAT…
ii. When can you use this type of visualization?
iii.Tips
B. Pair and share: introduce your graph to your partner, sharing what you wrote. Ask your partner a question about their graph.
C. As a class, build “Tips for graphing” so you will know how and when to use different data visualizations.
2. Read this quick summary of topic areas and pick one.

Day 3:
1. Childhood obesity practice:
A. Explain “working thesis/hypothesis” – can change
B. Your working thesis should have a comparison (across time, gender, place)
C. Example: “Over the past 20 years, childhood obesity has been a growing
problem in the United States.”
i. Identify the comparison.
ii. Brainstorm possible “subtopics.” Subtopics are related topics which, in this project, may not repeat words/ideas from your thesis (except time, gender, or place names). Students often come up with ideas like:
a. Hours of screen time
b. Percentage of schools with PE classes
c. Percentage of families who eat dinner together
d. Average distance to closest supermarket
e. Hours of homework
f. Participation in athletics
g. Cost of healthy food, like product
h. etc.
2. Students read background portfolios on their topic area:
A. Practice stepping stones as a class, then together look for stepping stones (No
pandemic? Do this in groups.)
C. Look at starting graphs and draft a working thesis.
NOTES:
1. Over the years, we have found it works best for us to provide them with graphs from which they chose one and write an interpretive statement communicating some of the information shown as their hypothesis, which can change as they develop their infographic.
2.This year, I was able to create these background reading documents, which I stuffed with references to indicators related to their topic. They used these background readings as stepping stone sources to plan the next round of research. For example, one of our topics was global female imprisonment, and the background reading included this passage:

…I learned that crime is not what really brought these women to prison. Far from it. It started with a lack of education, whose supply and quality is not equal for all. It starts with a lack of economic opportunities, which pushes these women to the petty survival crimes. The broken health system, the broken criminal system, the broken social-justice system. If any of these poor women fall through any of these cracks, the bottom of that chasm is a prison.

From this passage, they can note that indicators related to imprisonment include: education, economic opportunities, healthcare, etc.

Homework: Write a working thesis, complete noting potential subtopics mentioned in the background reading.

Day 4:
1. Introduce acceptable data sets. We provide all data. This is still hard and messy, to navigate, but just sending them to online databases (go look at UN Data!) is waaay too hard. So we give them this TOC (mostly links to spreadsheets I have downloaded and cleaned up).
2. Take out list of subtopics gleaned from the background reading and look through the TOC (we have them read the *whole* thing, saves arguments later!).
3. Pick a data set that covers a topic that will help contextualize your thesis (we talk quite a bit about how this is not really “evidence” since neither causation nor directionality is assured).

Homework: Draft your first graph.

NOTES:
1. We spend a *lot* of time demonstrating imperfect circles, terrible stick figures, and sloppy handwriting. They hear not to spend more than 10 minutes on the draft. We compliment students on the “draftiness” of their drafts.
2. We ask for screenshots of the data and the citation because the number of ways students find to lose track of their data as this project continues defies the imagination. Also, always better to build your citations as you go!

Next several classes:
Independent work. Each night, for four nights, students sketch a rough draft on paper of a visualization of one data set they planned to use as evidence. Each day, in class, we select five visualizations and discuss them as a class–each student has a chance to have one visualization complemented and critiqued. She tells the class her working thesis, describes her data visualization (projected on the screen), and tells us how it helps explain a systematic factor impacting her thesis. Then, she got three compliments, three questions, and three kinds of constructive feedback. We encourage student to take notes/jot down new ideas based on peer work and/or critiques.

When they do the fourth graph, we also ask them to write four “statistical statements” – a bit more data or other interpretive information to help flesh out the story their infographic tells.

Day 8:
1. Students get a piece of paper and post-its to do a mock up (wireframe) of their infographic.
2. When students turn in their bibliography and show their paper wireframe, they get their code for Pictochart and learn to set it up.

Day 9:
Assemble infographic on Pictochart

Day 10:
Prepare to present your infographic. You will tell us:
Explain your main argument or thesis statement. What do you intend for your infographic to convey? Explain why you were interested in this topic, and the information you were thinking you’d find when you started this project.
Explain 2 of your 4 graphs and how they relate to your thesis.
Explain 2 pieces of your additional evidence, and how they add to your argument
What was one aspect of your infographic that was difficult for you? How did you resolve this difficulty?
What information did you wish you had found that you were unable to find?
If you were to start this project again with the same topic, how would you approach your infographic differently?

Day 11-12:

Presentations (eight per day)

I suspect we all have one (at least). Some project we were hot on going into March, 2020, and have left dangling since. Please bear with me while I share my dropped passion project here, to get myself geared up for next year; I encourage you to share yours in the comments below to kick-start your own enthusiasm!

Note-taking has been an interesting animal: not one that interests me a lot, or that I was ever trained to teach, but a skill that definitely falls by the wayside in an age of copy-and-paste-into-a-Google-Doc availability. We are a proud NoodleTools school (which the students love-we literally have a cohort of Seniors pushing to endow NoodleTools to graduates in perpetuity as their Senior Gift, that is how much they love it), but we have needed some additional ways to help students read meaningfully. In particular, our Middle School teachers focus heavily on plagiarism, and have started thinking about its relationship to reading comprehension. So, we began wondering what kind of note-taking lessons we wanted to offer as a strategy for asking students to slow down and prioritize understanding.

Our experimental solution: visual note-taking.

By some bit of luck, I got to work with both our seventh grade science class and our seventh grade history class on a pilot of this endeavor.

In Science, students were preparing to design experiments for our Middle School science fair. Often, when researching and writing their proposals, their teacher noted a tendency to parrot language that they did not understand. So, as part of the lesson when we talked about NoodleTools and writing citations as a form of source evaluation, we also practiced drawing for comprehension:

• Slides I made for class included samples made by my Research TAs when I was testing the usefulness of the approach, and then took a passage on transpiration for which the class assisted me in collaboratively build a visual note (none of us knew what it meant when we started, but we did when we finished).
• Drawing together on the whiteboard and then showing my notes let me emphasize the “very drafty” nature of my notes, as opposed to something one might create for an art show.
• Small groups has short passages on circulation systems and respiratory systems in insects and earthworms. Their prompt was to draw notes that they could understand to help them unpack the meaning of their reading.

Many of the students were vocal about hating the process — they found it so much slower than just writing down random words and sentences from their reading. However, their visual notes made it clear that they understood their reading very well:




Some weeks later, we returned to this strategy in History. Students were doing research for a Renaissance Dinner Party: They each learned about an assigned historical figure, created a class presentation, and then had to seat ten people covered by the presentations around a table at a dinner party in such a way that no fights would break out and all guests would be entertained.

For the research stage, we returned to the idea of visual note taking. This lesson was a longer process, covering several days, and including a number of different strategies for communicating learning in a manner where the language of the articles they read would not suit (such as a fake Twitter where the historical figures chatted and threw shade).

• At the end of the first day, the students compiled a list of advice for visual note-taking.
• We once again practiced as a class with drawing “messy stick figures,” and students started comparing and bragging about the messiness they achieved.
• Students did note that they wanted to demonstrate emotions/interactions and to be able to tell individuals apart. I brought in iconography from the amazing Good Tickle Brain* and looked at how Mya Lixian Gosling’s very simple drawings of Shakespeare characters (for example, Cleopatra and Juliet), which seemed to help a lot.

Some students still felt frustrated (particularly those who felt more successful and comfortable memorizing and repeating), but some really interesting feedback did come my way. It is anecdotal, but impressive:

• The day that students had to hand in their visual notes on three articles they read for homework, a bunch were waiting for me at the library. They explained that they had found it boring to re-draw the same material, and wanted to check if it was ok that they took all their notes on one set of pictures.
• Let me rephrase: They synthesized their notes from several sources onto one set of images. Students naturally moved from a linear set of pull quotes, article-by-article, to integrated knowledge.
• An elated student stopped by to tell me about how her “super-smart, intimidating” uncle had come by for dinner. She often felt nervous with him, because he always wanted to know what she was learning from school: “and I remembered everything, without even *looking* at my notes!”

This pilot felt meaningful to me. Genuinely understanding and remembering content, paired with natural synthesis is a holy grail I will happily continue to pursue. Later, I developed (but have not tested) a theoretical self-grading rubric to use with visual notes, based on a Verbal to Visual post:

I was able to take another brief stab with our Chemistry classes when they were supposed to be looking at how a range of experiments were conducted, but students tended to focus on the outcome because they often could not visualize the experiments themselves. Sixth grade Science took on a drawing project this year to practice understanding relative dating and geology. And, with our History department’s Advanced Topics Research & Writing class, we now how three years of evidence of many students radically relearning note-taking for deep research.

But I really want to develop a much deeper understanding of note-taking, and get our students experimenting with different methods to find the best fit for themselves. I’ve also been dreaming of doing an exhibit of employee’s notes — showing students that the adults on campus have developed a range of methods that work personally for each of us. I worry that the hurry to “get through the workload” makes more work as students develop frictionless paths that feel like less work…but since they tend to sidestep understanding, I suspect they end up taking much more work in the long-term, with less actual learning.

So — that is something I am excited to get back to work on. How about you?

*And don’t forget to check out Good Tickle Brain — I doubt you will regret it!

Sara Zoroufy is a junior and the Research Teaching Assistant for the Castilleja School library. Inspired by Nora Murphy’s work on source literacy, Sara chose to spend this year observing research lessons and unpacking how she and other students think about sources. Her work helps inform lesson planning. Here, she shares an idea she has been contemplating recently.

“CNN reports that the Justice Department found the following statistics…”

During a presentation in our tenth grade government class, this phrase caught my attention. Why would a speaker attribute a statistic to two different sources? I have been thinking about this turn of phrase for a long time, trying to understand precisely why it troubled me. Recently, I realized that students struggle to distinguish factual evidence from a source’s analysis of that evidence. In the example above, the student was having trouble determining what type of information she was citing and which source was responsible for the creation of that information. Without separating evidence from analysis, we can neither evaluate nor properly cite a source. I tried to draw a visual to help myself understand how a source breaks down into these components, which culminated in this flowchart:

Mapping these concepts in this way helped me identify a number of key points in the process of evaluating a source. I began to think that the essential questions that students should initially ask when faced with a particular source are: what is the evidence that is presented, what is the corresponding analysis, and what sources shaped each component?

Asking these questions is the first step in unpacking a source, and the answers are not always immediately clear when students encounter unfamiliar genres of writing. This year, my grade was presented with an excerpt from a Pulitzer prize winning piece of investigative journalism about the diagnosis of black lung in coal miners. We were asked to identify the sources of the statistics in the article. No one was able to locate this information because journalistic convention dictates integrating the names of sources into the text, as opposed to employing parenthetical citations that students use in their own writing. For example, just prior to starting a bullet pointed list of statistical evidence, the article said, “The Center [for Public Integrity] recorded key information about these cases, analyzed [the medical expert’s] reports and testimony, consulted medical literature and interviewed leading doctors.”[1]  Since the students weren’t accustomed to this particular form of citation, many of us responded that no sources were given.

Students had been instructed to pinpoint the evidence in the article and label it with an “E” and to identify and label its sources with an “S.” As I sat with Tasha Bergson-Michelson, our instructional librarian, and considered my flowchart in relation to the lesson, we realized that the instruction had skipped over several crucial steps in the process of identifying the evidence. This experience made it clear that identifying the sources of evidence can be confusing, and that simply telling students to exercise that skill was not effective. Rather, the development of this skill requires explicit instruction and opportunities to focus on practicing it.

Once we’ve identified the source’s evidence and where it came from, we are able to further evaluate it. Depending on the type of evidence, we can investigate its quality and veracity in different ways–reading the methodology behind a study or poll, for example, or comparing the details of anecdotal evidence across various sources. Another factor to take into consideration is the original publication venue of the evidence itself. Recognizing the background of the publication adds to our understanding of the ethos of the evidence, as well as the sponsor’s motivation for collecting the evidence.

After examining the evidence, we can begin to consider the analysis of that evidence. The analysis reflects the perspective of the author and the publication in which it appears. Often, students stop their investigation into a source once they have determined its bias or perspective, but that is only the beginning. The real importance lies in the source’s purpose–why and how that perspective is being argued. Our history department uses the acronym SOAPA–Subject, Occasion, Author, Purpose, and Audience–to remind us to critically evaluate each aspect of a source.[2] This strategy has been particularly helpful in reminding us to think about the author’s purpose and how it shapes the analysis of their evidence.

I find it useful to think of every source, be it a journal article or a photograph, as an essay that selects and interprets evidence to support its thesis, but that comparison is not necessarily intuitive. This idea that all sources make an argument is easily overlooked, especially when we students are presented with historical documents which we sometimes subconsciously perceive as pure fact. In our 8th grade science classes, students first encounter the idea that nonfiction can be analyzed like literature. The lesson teaches students to consider the language of a source to determine what argument the author is making and what they want the audience to think, feel, or do.

Differentiating between evidence and analysis is the first step in considering the three essential questions: what is the evidence that is presented, what is the corresponding analysis, and what sources shaped each component? Answering these questions helps us understand:

• Sources make arguments using evidence and analysis.
• Evidence tells us what the source is using to make its argument.
• Evaluating the origin and quality of the evidence contributes to our understanding of the strength of the argument.
• Critically evaluating the publication venue of the source itself helps us recognize the perspective the analysis will try to validate.
• Doing a close reading of the analysis in the source gives us insight into the author’s intention in making the argument.

In the case of the quote that started this whole journey, knowing that the evidence came from the Department of Justice and the analysis from CNN allows students to draw on any credibility offered by the DOJ’s statisticians and CNN’s popularity as a source of reporting. The students themselves attain credibility by demonstrating that their thinking is based upon rigorous sources.

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1. Chris Hamby, Brian Ross, and Matthew Mosk, “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from black lung, buried by law and medicine,” The Center for Public Integrity, last modified October 30, 2013, accessed March 2, 2017. https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/10/30/13637/johns-hopkins-medical-unit-rarely-finds-black-lung-helping-coal-industry-defeat.
2. The College Board recommends a similar version, SOAPSTone, for its history APs.