Discussion Guide: Information Literacy Lab

You will be divided into groups and assigned a number that corresponds to a topic.

Based on your group's assigned topic, evaluate the corresponding resources linked in the "Group Resources" box below for use in a research paper.

You will have 15 minutes to evaluate all your group's sources.

Please select one person to write down your group's answers and have them ready to present to the rest of the class. You are encouraged to use the Internet to check facts, verify, learn more, etc., but you will not be able to evaluate all the resources in 10 minutes' time, so don't worry. Do the best you can, this isn't a trap.

Group One: School Choice

• The Growing Segmentation of the Charter School Sector in North Carolina (white paper North Carolina Opportunity Scholarships: Countering a Flawed Duke Report and coverage of white paper and media bias of Washington Examiner; What is a white paper?; Did you Google the authors or the publication?)
• American Federation for Children: Research (About AFC--notice the .ORG domain and how it is meaningless, How AFC is connected to Parents for Education Freedom in NC, other groups like the AFC including The Center for Education Reform and EdChoice-- all lobbyist groups that link to research that you may or may not want to use carefully considering why it has been linked.)
• How School Choice Became an Explosive Issue (Notice the date; media bias of The Atlantic using a different media bias resource. It presents both sides but does it do so fairly? What are some characteristics of this article that make it authoritative?)
• New Evidence on School Choice and Racially Segregated Schools (about the Brookings Institution, Did you Google the author and his institution?; this article supports the idea the move toward a research question that is not "Does school choice work well?/Is school choice good?" but instead a more complex, better question such as "What is the effect of school choice on segregation in the U.S.?")

Group Two: Obesity

WARN STUDENTS THAT DIET, NUTRITION, AND BODY MASS/WEIGHT/SIZE ARE DISCUSSED IN THESE RESOURCES AND THAT THEY ARE SUPPORTED IF THEY CHOOSE TO LEAVE THE ROOM AT ANY TIME. THEY DO NOT NEED TO OFFER AN EXPLANATION OR ASK PERMISSION.

• Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong (About the Huffington Post; Media Bias Report; Did you Google the author?; Is this article authoritative? Is it scholarly? How much of it is opinion? How to use this article as a gateway to other sources and why to consider citing those instead)
• Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and adults (About the Lancet, Media bias report, funding from the Wellcome Trust and AstraZeneca, What are the benefits of citing secondary scholarly research compared to primary research?)
• Body Mass Index, the Most Widely Used But Also Widely Criticized Index. Would a Criterion Standard Measure of Total Body Fat Be a Better Predictor of Cardiovascular Disease Mortality? (May also be found through Lesley University Library, funding from Coca Cola & the nature of "unrestricted" research grants, Is this primary or secondary research?)