Evaluating Resources

According to the PA Core Standards, students must be able to evaluate resources based on credibility, relevance, currency, accuracy and bias. Many students understand that they need to use "good" resources, but find it much more difficult to define exactly what this means. In order to help my students to determine if a resource is worthwhile for a particular project, I devised a rubric for evaluation. Teachers use rubrics in order to make subjective evaluations more concrete, so it only makes sense to teach students to do the same thing in their evaluation of resources. I urge students to recognize that the same source might receive excellent scores for one research topic, but only mediocre scores for another. The research question or thesis statement greatly influences which resources are most useful. I try to make this concept easy to conceive for students with a number of examples throughout the evaluation rubric. The best part of having a very structured form for evaluation is that it only takes a few minutes to go over, and then students have a reference point for the rest of their research endeavors. After using the rubric for several projects, students no longer need to use the physical rubric because they begin to look for elements of good resources automatically.

Please feel free to modify and use the Evaluation of Resources rubric with your students. If you repost this rubric, please provide proper credit!