Library and Information Science Commons^™

"It Was Information Based": Student Reasoning When Distinguishing Between Scholarly And Popular Sources, Amy Jankowski, Alyssa Russo, Lori Townsend

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Scholarly and popular sources are a longstanding construct in library instruction. A quick Google search brings up an abundance of LibGuides and tutorials on the subject. However, we have found that teaching students to identify and classify information sources using a rigid binary categorization is problematic. In an effort to better understand the ways students conceptualize and evaluate sources, we stepped back to ask: what kind of reasoning do students apply when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources?