Adding Friction. A Preservice Librarian Asks, "How Can I Teach Triangulation Effectively?"

by Debbie Abilock, November 2018

A Tradition of Three

The prefix tri-, derived from both Latin and Greek, signifies three. Surveyors, mapmakers and navigators have traditionally used the term triangulation to signify the process of determining an accurate location by viewing it from three different directions. Today, verification by threes has percolated through to other disciplines and professions, although three is not necessarily an essential factor for determining accuracy in every situation.

Information Literacy Instruction

Librarians teach triangulation primarily as a technique for confirming the accuracy of a fact. As an antidote to fake news, they exhort their peers to teach students to "verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases" (Valenza). We're instructed to require students to consult at least three sources of different types to "either locate or confirm a topic" (Stanley 53). Whether framed as a "Rule of Thumb" or a "Rule of Three," these strategies echo the traditional assumption that "three of something" (Stanley 66) can resolve doubt.

Trivial Pursuit

Such rules are mental shortcuts, heuristics that make decision-making efficient. However, rules can work to undermine validity by reinforcing cognitive biases. For example, if students assume that they're seeking objective and certain knowledge, they may just search to find replications of the exact phrase of their presumed fact in three sources.

Yet people deploy facts within a context, for a purpose. They are embedded, whether iteratively as confirmation in social media or as evidence for a claim in an argument. As an example, ask students to search [value of human life…million] to observe how the number before the word "million" varies by country, time and publisher. Facts are wrapped in complexity or contingencies. If students were to change that search to [value of human life 6.3 million], they are searching to match that number in other sources. Poorly implemented triangulation is simply training students to exercise confirmation bias (Nickerson 201). Triangulation becomes a trivial pursuit.

The Role of Sourcing in Triangulation

This brings us to teaching sourcing, since "the framing, not the facts, are [sic] often the bone of contention" (Mansky). We can add friction to our teaching by redesigning triangulation as a thinking process in which students wrestle with conflicting points of view or "frames" in multiple documents. To resolve inconsistencies they will deploy contextually relevant facets of sourcing to judge the veracity of their sources':

• Creators—expertise and who says what
• Containers—publication venues and genres
• Content—agreements, inconsistencies, contradictions

Controversy creates cognitive dissonance, which can change how students employ triangulation. At a basic level, students might validate a fact and recognize that uniform agreement signals common knowledge, which would need no attribution. At other times they might realize that encyclopedic content is best validated in publications not referenced in tertiary sources. For example, students find it more fruitful to cross-check Wikipedia information in peer-reviewed journal articles, primary sources, personal narratives, and original research—publications that are poorly represented in that reference source. (Redi et al.).

Effective Triangulation Assignments

1. Ask for explanations.

I've included data in-the-wild in the triangulation scavenger hunt examples below, since students often are faced with unattributed statistics. Significant learning can happen when students are asked to triangulate their results and then explain why they've relied on certain sources to confirm or refute a statistic. What multiple independent sources can be used to establish or refute these claims?

• India has one of the world's highest traffic fatality rates.
• There were 25.4 million refugees in 2017.
• American women earn $12,600 less than men before children are born and $25,100 less afterward.

2. Identify the type of thinking you expect students to do.

In these triangulation challenges, students are likely to encounter Internet sources of varying quality written by authors with diverse (or nonexistent) expertise.

• Analyze Aung San Suu Kyi's views on human rights in Myanmar by triangulating the dates of her speeches.
• Summarize your Congressional representative's position on gun control using his or her statements to three different types of audiences.
• Locate one area of agreement among Americans about a social or economic issue by comparing information from three publications with different AllSides Media Bias Ratings (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings).

3. Show authentic examples to ensure that students will transfer strategies to new situations.

Lacking real-world models, students may devise inappropriate strategies for validating the results of their own triangulation. For example, they might decide to average differing population statistics for the same country, rather than first determining the currency and publisher of each data source.

Offer examples of triangulation in action. For example, OpenSecrets (https://www.opensecrets.org/) triangulates campaign contributions with lobbying expenses and earmarks. Ask students to investigate money's influence on a legislator by comparing what is earmarked for companies by members of Congress who have benefitted from donations from company employees and political action committees supported by that company.

Lateral Reading

Sam Weinberg's draws on the practices of fact checkers to propose that students read laterally, that is, seek context and perspective from other sites before evaluating the source's author, About page, etc. (Wineburg; Wineburg and McGrew). Before asking students to read three reports on self-driving cars, suggest that they search on each publisher's name (in bold below) to see how others describe the organization. Then ask them to predict how each report will frame the issue of safety of autonomous vehicles. Finally, after reading the reports, ask students to compare their expectations to the report's actual position.

Friction Maximizes Learning

Highly-focused triangulation assignments that target authentic strategies can take less than a single class to implement. Clearly they demand more intense planning than simply issuing the directive: "Go corroborate / triangulate this fact…". However, the additional effort on your part is warranted. A number of research studies correlate the cognitive process of evaluating sources with better comprehension, more-sophisticated argument writing and increased likelihood of synthesizing information (Bråten et al. 146). Instructional friction in triangulation assignments can reap large gains in student learning.

Works Cited (MLA Format)

Bråten, Ivar, et al. "The Role of Sourcing in Discourse Comprehension." Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes, edited by Michael F. Schober et al., 2nd ed., Taylor and Francis, pp. 141-66.

Mansky, Jackie. "The Age-Old Problem of 'Fake News.'" Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 7 May 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/age-old-problem-fake-news-180968945/.

Nickerson, Raymond S. "Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises." Review of General Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 175-220, pages.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/nickersonConfirmationBias.pdf.

Redi, Miriam, et al. "What Are the Ten Most Cited Sources on Wikipedia? Let's Ask the Data." Wikimedia Blog, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Apr. 2018, blog.wikimedia.org/2018/04/05/ten-most-cited-sources-wikipedia/.

Stanley, Deborah B. Practical Steps to Digital Research: Strategies and Skills for School Libraries. ABC-CLIO, 2018.

Valenza, Joyce. "Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: A News Literacy Toolkit for a 'Post-truth' World." Neverending Search, School Library Journal, 26 Nov. 2016, blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/.

Wineburg, Sam, and Sarah McGrew. Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Working paper no. 2017-A1, Stanford History Education Group, 9 Oct. 2017. SSRN, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048994.

Wineburg, Samuel S. "Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence." Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 83, no. 1, Mar. 1991, pp. 73-87, doi:10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.73.