Description

Where the knowledge applies:
Surface credibility signals — domain authority, publication name recognition, citation counts — are useful starting points and unreliable endpoints for source evaluation. This module develops the analytical judgment that goes beyond those signals to assess the methodological and evidential quality of information at a professional standard.

What the module works through:
– Evaluation framework application: CRAAP, SIFT, and lateral reading methodologies — their appropriate application contexts, their limitations, and how to combine them for more robust assessment than any single framework provides
– Authority and methodology assessment: evaluating the credentials, institutional context, and methodological transparency of information producers — distinguishing genuine expertise from credentialed opinion and reported findings from interpreted conclusions
– Publication and peer review process analysis: understanding how different publication models — peer-reviewed, grey literature, commercial, governmental — affect the reliability and limitations of the information they produce

Module duration: +/- 5 hours

What changes in practice:
A source evaluation practice grounded in analytical judgment rather than heuristic shortcuts — producing conclusions that are built on information whose reliability has been assessed rather than assumed, and that hold up when the quality of the underlying sources is scrutinized.