Two Sources, One Claim
Eighth-grade research unit. Students are building infographics on a local question: should the district move middle school start times later? You have supplied three sources: a district press release announcing the proposal, a class survey of 40 students that students designed and ran themselves, and a news article summarizing a national study linking later start times to improved adolescent attendance. In drafts, students are introducing all three with 'studies show' and weighting them equally. One group has written that the survey 'proves students want later start times.' You have two lab days before the summative, which requires students to evaluate source credibility and distinguish correlation from causation.
1. What is the actual content confusion here - what do students misunderstand about sources, and how would you find out before teaching?
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The visible error is 'studies show' pasted onto three unlike documents. But the underlying misconception is more interesting: students are treating credibility as a stamp a source receives rather than a fit between a specific claim and specific evidence.
That's why the survey 'proves' student preference - to them, a survey is a source, sources are either good or bad, and this one is theirs. The CRAAP checklist, if I teach it, will make the problem worse: every source will get a passing grade on authority and currency, and the press release will score well on every row while still being the most interested document in the set.
Before teaching, I'd run a five-minute diagnostic. Give students the three sources and one claim - 'Later start times improve attendance' - and ask them to rank which source best supports it and why. If they rank the survey first because 'it's real data,' the confusion is relevance. If they rank the press release first because 'it's official,' the confusion is authority-as-truth. Those need different lessons, and I currently don't know which I have.
2. Design the two lab days so that students build the evaluative judgment rather than memorizing a checklist.
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Lab Day 1 - break the sources against a moving claim. Students work in trios through three claims, marking each source strong / partial / useless for that claim:
- 'The district has proposed a change.' (Press release is strong - it is the proposal.)
- 'Later start times caused better attendance locally.' (Nothing in the set supports this. The national study is elsewhere; the survey measures preference.)
- 'Students at this school prefer a later start.' (Survey is partial - 40 respondents, self-selected, and students wrote the questions.)
The point students should collide with: the same document changes value depending on the claim. That is the idea a checklist cannot deliver.
Lab Day 2 - the causal question. Present the national study's actual finding as association. Ask: 'What else could explain why schools with later start times have better attendance?' Collect alternatives on the board - bus schedules, neighborhood income, schools that changed for other reasons. Then have students rewrite one sentence from their infographic, replacing 'proves' or 'studies show' with language that matches the strength of the evidence. Sentence-level revision makes the abstract distinction visible and assessable.
3. A group insists their survey 'proves' student opinion because they collected the data themselves. How do you respond, and how do you keep the summative from becoming a checklist recitation?
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I'd take their claim seriously, because it's half right: primary data is powerful, and they earned the finding. The correction is about scope, not quality - 'Your survey proves what 40 students in this room said last Tuesday. That's a real finding. What word in your infographic is doing more work than your evidence can carry?' Usually they can find it themselves: proves, all students, the majority.
Then I'd push on design in a way they can act on: who was in the cafeteria at the time, who wrote the questions, and what would a reader need to know to trust the number? That's source evaluation they'll remember because it's about their own work.
For the summative, I'd assess the transfer, not the vocabulary. Instead of 'List three criteria for evaluating a source,' the task is: here is a new claim and two unfamiliar sources; write two sentences explaining which one you'd use and what it cannot tell you. A checklist recitation can't survive an unfamiliar text. I'd score for whether the student names a limitation that is actually relevant to the claim - not whether they remembered the acronym.