Evaluation

I'm looking at my lesson plans for the research writing classes this fall and I think I'm going to try to re-write them with an eye towards evaluation all the way through the sessions. In the past I've looked at evaluation mostly during the session where we cover internet resources, but with more and more good information being available on the web and the truth that some print information is not really all that scholarly, I think it's way past time to change that.

So, beginning with the encyclopedia research article I'm looking at right now, I'm going to give students things to look at for specific sources. So like for Encyclopedias I'm going to say look at the publishers, look for authors listed on the individual articles, look for a bibliography, etc. For Journal articles they might be looking for a peer reviewed status, the names of the peer editors, a bibliography and so on.

Hopefully this will help them look at evaluation up front, and impress the need to evaluate research, facts, and figures from the beginning of the research process, not only when searching Google.