High Quality
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A project of the Public Learning Media Laboratory
Website:http://www.boolify.org
Important Questions for Evaluating Web & Research Material
The following questions represent
some
of the important qualities toknow about information when exploring its relevance to your work. Allresources have been written by someone – an expert or, in manycases, not.Whether the information you are browsing is located in a newspaper,wiki or peer-reviewed journal, there are some fundamental answersyou must know in order to sift the poor-quality information from therich:Start with the basics:
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Who authored the article, web page or resource? Does a websearch pull up their biography? What have they done that makesthem an expert?
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When was it authored? Have other lines of research or work filledin gaps, or provided new theories?
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What group of individuals was the article written to inform?
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Was the article peer-reviewed, and by what body of people?
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If the article is located in a place where commenting is allowed,what insights can you glean through reading the comments?Further identify:
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What is its bias?
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If funded, who provided the funding?
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What evidence can you find, elsewhere, that corroborates orrefutes the research that you have found?Activity: Have students evaluatehttp://www.dhmo.org/. What evidencecan they find that confirms or disproves this hypothesis? (Worksheet,page 2; note that fine web evaluation criteria can be found in manylocations on the web, as noted below).Further reading: Cornell University’s “Evaluating Websites: Criteria and Tools” page presents a range of high-quality information.
A project of the Public Learning Media Laboratory
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