Black and White Thinking

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash

Today I was working with a student who dismissed a website because of "bad grammar". When I looked at the site, I didn't see anything that would have caused me to dismiss it. 

Is it so easy?

The other day I was in a classroom where the teacher was having students use the CRAAP test. The website's tagline in the screenshot above says, "Evaluating sources easily". It is not easy to evaluate sources online. The C in CRAAP stands for current. Are current sources more reliable? Are John Dewey or Marie Curie not reliable sources?

A framework is a good starting point, but if we are not teaching students to look laterally, leave sites and check the author's credentials as well as reviews about the site, we are in danger of leaving them to think that if one of the criteria is not met, a site is not reliable.

It needs to be made explicit that one little miss on the test does not mean that the whole site is trash.