Inductively Evaluate Website Reliability

This is a continuation of an earlier article about improving students’ search skills.

Choosing The Best Results

Search engines help us find relevant websites, however the ranking systems do not necessarily return the most reliable pages. This final step requires our human minds to make difficult and fuzzy decisions.

Simply choosing the top result is not enough. We must teach our students to evaluate websites.

Too Complicated

Ever search for advice on teaching students to evaluate websites? You’ll find elaborate pages from Purdue, Cornell, and Berkeley.

These sites use fancy words like “authority, currency, and coverage” or give students a giant, twenty-five item checklist. I want my students to quickly differentiate between reliable and unreliable sites, and these techniques just don’t help.

Let’s approach the problem inductively and rely on our students’ intuition to guide us through this thorny issue.

Round One

A pre-set of rules quickly becomes unwieldily, so instead let’s begin with a set of examples to analyze. Connect a laptop to a projector and start a class discussion.

Go through a set of pages about the same topic, like so:

A Tumblr page about the blue-ringed octopus
A page from Animal Planet about the same topic
A question on Yahoo Answers about the octopus (Yahoo Answers is no more but here’s the archived link)
PBS’s page about the blue-ringed octopus
A page from thinkquest.org about the octopus

For each page, ask students how reliable they think the information is. Ask for a “reliability rating” out of four stars. Then ask what specific details influence this reliability? Jot these ideas down.

You’ll probably start to see a pattern emerge. Have students group their common details into categories. These might include:

visual appearance – sites that appear modern might be more reliable
author credibility – what information about the author is presented
prior knowledge – does the information jive with students’ understanding of the topic?
organization’s credibility – is this website connected with a TV show, book, school, etc?
ease of editing – can this site be edited by anyone or only experts?

Note that students are essentially creating their own rubric for evaluating website reliability.

Round Two

Here’s another set of pages, which might become a homework assignment or just a second classroom discussion:

Ask if the patterns held up for both sets of pages. Refine and revise your class’ ideas.

An Ongoing Exercise

Repeat this discussion throughout the year. You’ll develop patterns and special cases. Write these down as you constantly revise your classroom understanding of website reliability.
Don’t expect these rules to stay static! The web will change dramatically in the next six months, so constantly come back to your “signs of a reliable website.” The discussion will also tune you in to your students’ understanding of the internet, which might be vastly different from your expectations.

Watch the video lesson →