I-Know Faculty Guide:Activity Ideas for SLO 2: Evaluate

The process of evaluating a source's credibility and suitability is typically an invisible process. In order to make this process visible, I-Know has adapted a series of Thinking Routines into editable lessons and activities. These Thinking Routines were developed by Project Zero, a research center at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and have been adapted to meet the needs of SLO 2: Evaluate. These routines help build students’ skills and confidence related to evaluating credibility and suitability of resources for their information need, and can be used across disciplines. They are designed to be scaffolded practice activities, and not a summative assessment of this learning objective.

Red Light, Yellow Light

The Red Light, Yellow Light Thinking Routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This activity provides students with practice finding generalizations, bold claims, and gaps in evidence within a resource or argument, and practice pausing to ask questions when those moments arise. 

Applications: Students can use this activity to evaluate many different kinds of resources in various disciplines. Project Zero suggests using this routine to evaluate news resources, political speeches, math proofs that might have weaknesses, and popular science resources.

Claim, Support, Question

The Claim, Support, Question Thinking Routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This activity provides students with practice identifying claims, examining claims with evidence, and asking questions to find gaps in evidence.

Applications: Students can use this activity to evaluate many different kinds of resources in various disciplines. Some examples of resources include a piece of text, poem, artwork, speech, advertisement, and social media post. 

Using an AI Prompt as a Canvas Stimulus Quiz 

This example activity is one way to share AI responses to prompts in Canvas, for students to critically evaluate the text and sources provided by AI Research Tools, such as Perplexity AI, MS Copilot Chat, ChatGPT, or many others. A Stimulus Question is a feature in Canvas New Quizzes that allows instructors to provide students with a block of text (such as an AI-generated response) alongside related quiz questions.

How It Works:

• The quiz is built around Stimulus Questions, one or more, each Stimulus displays the full text of an AI-generated response from a different AI tool
  • This example uses a Perplexity AI example, and MS CoPilot example
  • These were chosen because they are among the tools that can provide links to sources in their response text, and a list of sources gathered for their response
  • Other possible tools: ChatGPT (which now can link to outside sources), Google Gemini, Liner AI, and many others
• AI response text is pasted directly into the stimulus.  
  • The specific AI tool used, prompt used, and date of the query are including in the Simulus.
  • The AI response text itself is used in the Stimulus, versus a screenshot, since text is accessible to assistive technology, whereas a screenshot image of text would not be.  
  • Copy/pasting should preserve the active hyperlinks to sources within the AI response.  However, in this example, quiz questions don't require clicking on any of the links to external sources, as this would navigate outside of Canvas.  If you do use a question that involves clicking the source links, check that they're still active.  
• A set of quiz questions follows each Stimulus, guiding students to evaluate the AI response and/or its sources.  Questions can be regarding:
  • Source format issues (e.g., web pages instead of peer-reviewed journal articles).
  • Date range mismatches (e.g., sources that fall outside a specified time frame).
  • Misalignment between citations and AI-generated claims (e.g., sources that do not accurately support the AI's statements).
  • The answers to the example questions provided can be ascertained from information within the Stimulus, or if is about a source article itself, the article or pages of it can be added as a Canvas Course Document embedded into the question prompt (as in Quest ion #3)

The quiz content and example questions are below, exported from Canvas in PDF format.  

To use this activity in your course you can contact Eric Cosio to copy this quiz into your Canvas course.  You can use it as is or modify as needed. 

If you want help creating or adapting activities that reflect the I-Know Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) into your own course, you can contact Eric Cosio at eric.cosio@tamucc.edu

The SIFT Method was created by Mike Caulfield as a way for students to look beyond the webpage to determine whether or not the resource in front of them is or is not credible. SIFT stands for: 

• S: Stop
• I: Investigate the Source
• F: Find Better Coverage
• T: Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context

Professor Chimene Burnett from TAMU-CC has created a lesson for students to apply the SIFT method in class.

The Civic Online Reasoning, or COR Curriculum was developed by the Digital Inquiry Group as a free resource for K-12 teachers to teach the skill of evaluation to their students. While the curriculum is targeted for younger students, the activity ideas and concepts could give you some inspiration. In order to access lessons from this curriculum, you need to create a free account.