Information Literacy Commons^™

Online Source Evaluation Through “Lateral Reading”: A Workshop For Educators, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

Learning Outcomes:

• Become familiar with and apply lateral reading strategies to evaluating online sources.
• Explore ways to teach lateral reading to students in your educational context.

Audience: All educators, including K-12 teachers, public librarians, academic librarians, educational administrators and community organizers)

Both everyday life experience and a growing body of research show just how hard it is to determine the credibility of online sources. Traditional checklist approaches to evaluating websites (e.g., the CRAAP test) are ineffective, despite their continued prevalence. A more effective approach to quickly assessing the credibility of an online source is lateral reading. “Lateral reading” essentially involves …

Meaningful Work When Work Won't Love You Back: Sociological Imagination And Reflective Teaching Practice (Reports From The Field), Andrea Baer

Libraries Scholarship

This essay explores the tension between pursuing meaningful work in instruction librarianship and the realities of working in a society in which many jobs provide little fulfillment or pleasure, or, as the journalist Sarah Jaffe puts it, “Work won’t love you back.” Drawing on a recent conference keynote by Anne Helen Petersen, C. Wright Mills’s conception of sociological imagination, and an ecological model of teacher agency, I propose that one way librarians can sustain their teaching practices and preserve their well-being is by actively investigating how social structures and relationships influence their teaching roles.

Teaching Inclusive Citation Through A Library Workshop, Andrea Baer

Libraries Scholarship

In response to calls for greater equity and inclusion in scholarly publishing and in academia in general, many academic instruction librarians are looking to ways to promote inclusive citation practices. Inclusive citation essentially involves citing sources that reflect a greater diversity of voices and perspectives, while being aware of how power and social structures have traditionally influenced what voices are amplified and which are often overlooked. Inclusive citation requires thinking creatively about how and where we search for information, since traditional scholarly practices and common structures and features of many search tools (e.g., citation metrics, relevance rankings) are part of …

Never Judge A Website By Its Cover: A Mixed-Methods Investigation Into The Effectiveness Of A Tutorial On Lateral Reading, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

This poster will provide results of an IRB-approved study that assessed the effectiveness of an online tutorial on evaluating sources through lateral reading. Students who used lateral reading strategies were much more likely to accurately identify questionable sources as such. As students gained practice with lateral reading, the accuracy of their evaluations overall improved. Final reflection activities suggest that students' learning deepened as they considered ways that they might revise their evaluation strategies and how they might apply lateral reading strategies in their everyday life. In line with other research on lateral reading, this brief instructional intervention appears to have …

Flexible Pedagogies For Inclusive Learning: Balancing Pliancy And Structure And Cultivating Cultures Of Care, Andrea Baer

Libraries Scholarship

In this essay, I reflect on flexibility as a concept and as a practice that has informed my teaching, in particular since adapting to online library instruction in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how flexible pedagogy principles and practices can be catalysts for reflective and inclusive teaching and a culture of care in all teaching contexts.

Diving Below The Surface: A Layered Approach To Teaching Online Source Evaluation Through Lateral And Critical Reading, Andrea Baer, Daniel G. Kipnis

Libraries Scholarship

As online environments have in many ways changed how information (including misinformation) is created and distributed, many educators have recognized a need for teaching new strategies for evaluating online sources for credibility and potential bias. Educators like Mike Caulfield and research groups like the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) have stressed the need for “lateral reading,” a habit of fact-checking when initially evaluating a source. When reading laterally, a person doesn’t spend extensive time initially examining what a source says about itself; instead, they quickly move off of the site in question to look at what others have said about …

Dominant Covid Narratives And Implications For Information And Media Literacy Education In The “Post-Pandemic” United States, Andrea Baer

Libraries Scholarship

Over the past three+ years that COVID-19 has changed everyday life across the globe, the entire world has been tasked with making sense of new, evolving, and often conflicting information, including public message that is often confusing and shaped by political agendas and interests. Dominant narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate of the complexities and importance of information literacy, and more specifically of critical information literacy, which asks us to interrogate the ways that power and social structure influence what information is created and circulated and how we interact with and respond to it as individuals and collectives. In this …