8.5: Last thoughts on evaluation

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Strategies for evaluating information are both obvious and not so obvious.

Obvious: Factors that are relatively easy to identify are obvious and people often remember to look for them. The CRAP Test criteria is obvious to find: who is the author, what are their credentials, when was this published, and by whom? These are criteria that, with practice, you learn to look for quickly.

Less obvious: And you don't stop there - you evaluate each criterion. Say you know the name of the publisher, so you investigate and find out about the group that sponsored the research. You find the group's super-politically-one-sided and biased funding source, so now what? Does what you found out about the funding source make you trust the think tank's information more or less?

What isn't as obvious is how much importance and weight you assign to the criteria.

Not so obvious: Identifying what is missing is not obvious, and is hard. (Maybe impossible, because we don't know what we don't know!) Try asking yourself these questions to help with the not so obvious:

Whose voices might we not be hearing and why?
What background context is missing?
What information was omitted and for what reasons?
For my topic and for me, do the omissions matter?
Are my biases getting in the way of what I decide to trust?

These are the kinds of questions you can ask yourself as you interact with information. There probably won't be a cut and dry answer to them, either. On the same topic, my answers might be different than your answers.

What is important is that you and I ask them, and appreciate the value in asking them. We all have unique experiences and lenses through which we see the world, and asking questions (like "what's missing?" or "could I interpret this another way?") is imperative to accessing a more accurate, holistic view of the world. That is critical thinking, and when applied to the world of information, it is the foundation of information literacy.