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McNair Scholars: Evaluating Your Resources

This guide serves as a tool to assist McNair Scholars as they navigate their research.

Vocabulary & Glossary

  • Disinformation - is false information deliberately created to cause damage and/or confusion.
     
  • Misinformation - is false information inadvertently spread by third parties in the belief that it is genuine.
     
  • Malinformation - is genuine information presented or released in a way that causes damage or confusion. 
     

Content shared from Firstdraftnews.org under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Let's Talk Bigfoot

SWIFT Method (Five Moves) For Evaluating Sources

Evaluating information you find online on social media and in the course of research can be tricky. Checklists like the CRAAP test don't always catch more complex forms of suspect information out there

A more effective evaluative method is abbreviated as SWIFT and involves analyzing information using five steps. These five steps will use common applications and sites like WikipediaGoogle appscontextual clues, and fact-checking techniques instead of a checklist. 

 

SWIFT was adapted by Professor Chimene Burnett at TAMU-CC and is based on the SIFT method created by educational technologist Mike Caulfield in 2019. You may see many references to SIFT on this guide and in other places.

SWIFT and Bigfoot

Bigfoot and Taylor Swift

Acknowledgement & Attribution

Note: This SWIFT method guide was adapted from Michael Caulfield's "SIFT Method" and Professor Chimene Burnett's (TAMU-CC) SWIFT adaptation. The canonical version of the SIFT course exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc. The text and media of the SIFT site, where possible, is released into the CC-BY, and free for reuse and revision. We ask people copying this course to leave this note intact, so that students and teachers can find their way back to the original (periodically updated) version if necessary. We also ask librarians and reporters to consider linking to the canonical version.

As the authors of the original version have not reviewed any other copy's modifications, the text of any site not arrived at through the above link should not be sourced to the original authors.