Adding Friction. A Teacher Asks, "How Do I Teach Students to Evaluate an Author?"

School-age kids know what makes someone an expert:

• "Someone who knows more stuff than me about snakes," said a third grader.
• "She knows the times tables, so she does math problems faster," offered a middle schooler.
• "Expert Magic players have the best cards memorized and know the combos you can make, so they notice if an opponent can pull off a combo and can stop it in a way I haven't thought of," according to a high school sophomore.

Students say that experts know more than they do, are able to apply their knowledge more quickly and effectively, and solve problems in ways that students have not considered. Indeed, research has shown that even much younger children are aware that people have different areas of expertise (Keil, Stein, Webb, Billings, & Rozenblit, 2008).

What Is an Expert?

Sternberg and Horvath (1995) propose that experts, as a group, differ from novices in the way they approach and solve problems within their area of expertise:

• Knowledge: Experts have a significant "bank" of knowledge and select apt knowledge to fit the problem.
• Efficiency: Experts automate skills, recognize patterns, and organize and plan effectively.
• Insight: The combination of learning and skillfulness enables experts to recognize the nuances and complexity of an issue or problem, make novel connections, and work on fresh solutions.

Since student researchers are initially unfamiliar with their topics, they are not yet able to assess an author's expertise directly. Therefore, we aim to provide them with examples of indirect evidence to simplify their evaluation of sources. They can look for evidence of an author's specialization, determine what the author has produced, and find opinions that others have voiced about this person.

Has this person been acknowledged as an expert by others?

• Affiliations, such as employment in a company or organization, status as a board member, or volunteer service.
• Credentials, such as job qualifications, publications, or other credits.
• Awards, such as cited by, elected to, or other recognition, endorsements, or judgments.

Is there evidence of specialized experience or extended practice?

• First-hand experience, such as observation, involvement in an event, or interactions with a person or group.
• Formal knowledge, such as does research or works in this field or participates competitively
• Informal know-how, such as doing something continuously or sustained writing or speaking about something

However, it is misleading to turn these proxies for expertise into shopping lists because that leads students to formulaic decision making. It's not enough for students to just locate and check off evidence of expertise. Rather, an annotation for an entry in a reference list or an explanation within the body of the paper should connect the expertise to the student's topic: Why is this first-hand experience or area of specialization relevant? Instead of checklists, targeted interventions can provide the frictional "breaks" that will allow students the time to reason through their decisions.

Applying Friction to Teach Students to Evaluate an Author

How do we teach students to understand the relationship between an author's knowledge, expertise, and affiliations and the quality of the information being presented or omitted? How can students learn to recognize that the strength of evidence they want to use is related to both its relevance to their argument and the expertise of the person who offers it?

We know that novices are after the one right answer, make decisions about affiliations and expertise in binary categories (yes/no, right/wrong, black/white), and prefer to use an author's credentials as a proxy for credibility when the topic is unfamiliar (McCrudden, Stenseth, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2016, p. 148). Target your teaching to ameliorate this black and white dualism by presenting "environments and tasks that invite right/wrong thinkers to change themselves," nudging them to the next stage of intellectual development (Kloss, 1994). Ask students to compare experts who have similar credentials but are not equally qualified or to explain how qualifications that don't fit traditional conceptions of expertise are still useful. Why does six months' on the job endow less authority than a position one has held for ten years? How does six months doing lab and field research on amphibian disease signal a more complex understanding of frog decline than a semester biology class?

We've sometimes heard from teachers using NoodleTools that students choose to omit a source if it has no author, reasoning that the source is suspect if it's uncredited. Yet we know that there are perfectly appropriate news articles from BBC News or The Economist, useful overviews from CultureGrams or ABC-CLIO Solutions, and reports from the CDC or a UN subsidiary body that omit a byline. When their own knowledge of the topic is limited, we can suggest that students shift from finding an author to identifying and evaluating the publishing or sponsoring organization, rather than rejecting the content because it's unsigned.

Targeted Practice

Students need practice. Even though our instructions and criteria may be clear and specific, students aren't able to convert them into routines without rehearsal. To counteract their often restrictive interpretations of authority, present them with two experts for the same topic. For example, Ethan Pullman of Carnegie Mellon University uses a video clip of an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a TEDx talk by Erica Chenoweth, a scholar whose research is on nonviolent civil resistance, to fuel a comparison of the valid qualitative and quantitative evidence that different authorities offer and how the information gleaned from different forms of expertise can be integrated into their arguments (2017). Instead of instructing students to decide whether the writer is "telling the truth," show them how any author will have a worldview and context that shapes his treatment of a topic.

Rather than evaluating the final Works Cited lists, spend your time on formative feedback, such as asking students to explain concretely why they've included particular authors in their working bibliographies. When they aren't involved in a research project, use the first five minutes of class (Lang, 2016) to have them justify what know-how a group of authors you've selected brings to a certain topic.

Strategies

Remind students of strategies they can invoke to find experts. Demonstrate how to search laterally, a heuristic used by fact-checkers (Wineburg & McGrew, 2017) to uncover what can be learned about the source from others. Other teaching suggestions from Wineburg and McGrew will sound familiar:

• Identify where a source belongs in the context of other sources along a spectrum of viewpoints (38);
• Exercise "click restraint"—not just clicking on the first result—to make better judgments about sources from the search result snippets (42);
• Know how search results are constructed to weigh source rankings tactically (39).

Lacking other kinds of identification, students might even contact an author directly. The presence of a verified Twitter account or an e-mail in a byline implies that the author "stands behind" his or her writing and has a willingness to dialogue with readers in order to promote trust. While in and of itself the author's willingness to communicate is a weak indicator of authority, the student's questions can probe for evidence of expertise.

Origins, Context, and Suitability

The ACRL framework describes the practices of expert researchers in determining expertise and what that implies for an instructional progression under the threshold concept "Authority Is Constructed and Contextual," which describes the attitude of expert researchers as "informed skepticism." In this way, experts identify the authoritative sources as well as recognize biases that play into the creation of that authority.

"An understanding of this concept enables novice learners to critically examine all evidence—be it a short blog post or a peer-reviewed conference proceeding—and to ask relevant questions about origins, context, and suitability for the current information need. Thus, novice learners come to respect the expertise that authority represents while remaining skeptical of the systems that have elevated that authority and the information created by it." (2016)

Student Agency

Rather than deferring to perceived legitimacy or accepting self-proclaimed expertise at face value, we want our students to reason through authority. At the same time, we anticipate they will find their own voices, craft their own ideas, and participate in the public sphere. However, it does not serve them well to assert they have the chops to "change the world" without knowledge, skills, and expert heuristics. Your friction and feedback can set the scene for intentional practice by students, leading them toward their own and others' expertise.

References (APA format)

Association of College & Research Libraries. (2016). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Chicago, IL: ACRL. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.

Keil, F. C., Stein, C., Webb, L., Billings, V. D., & Rozenblit, L. (2008). Discerning the division of cognitive labor: An emerging understanding of how knowledge is clustered in other minds. Cognitive Science, 32(2), 259-300. https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210701863339

Kloss, R. J. (1994). A nudge is best: Helping students through the Perry Scheme of intellectual development. College Teaching, 42(4), 151-158. Retrieved from JSTOR database.

Lang, J. M. (2016, January 11). Small changes in teaching: The first 5 minutes of class. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-The/234869

McCrudden, M., Stenseth, T., Bråten, I., & Strømsø, H. I. (2016). The effects of topic familiarity, author expertise, and content relevance on Norwegian students' document selection: A mixed methods study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(2), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000057

Pullman, E. (2017, March 13). Authority from one area does not necessarily transfer to another area [Electronic mailing list message]. Retrieved from ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education listserv: http://lists.ala.org/sympa/arc/acrlframe/2017-03/msg00017.html

Sternberg, R. J., & Horvath, J. A. (1995). A prototype view of expert teaching. Educational Researcher, 24(6), 9-17. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1176079

Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2017, October). Lateral reading: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information (Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1). Retrieved from https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3048994