Adding Friction. A Preservice Librarian Asks, "CRAAP? SIFT? RAFT? COR? What Should I Teach?"
Author: Debbie Abilock
Abilock, Debbie. "Adding Friction. A Preservice Librarian Asks, 'CRAAP? SIFT? RAFT? COR? What Should I Teach?' ." School Library Connection, February 2023, schoollibraryconnection.com/content/article/2295302.
Column
by Debbie Abilock, February 2023
When the first graphical browser was released in 1993, Internet information literacy instruction was extrapolated from print paradigms. For example, educators taught students that superficial webpage errors could serve as a proxy for a source's quality since such mistakes in print were the result of sloppy editorial oversight. Likewise, format flaws signaled a publisher's inattention to design aesthetics. Since print newspapers drew a bright line between advertisers and the newsroom, students were taught to be suspicious of ads, as it implied that financial considerations might be influencing the content or claims.
Early search structures also favored single-source evaluation. One had to use the library catalog for books, a database for digitized magazines and journals, and Internet search engines for webpages. Although search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo indexed every word on the pages they crawled, searchers had to drill down through human-organized directories to find relevant results. The logic of evaluating sources one-by-one transferred to source-based checklists like CRAAP and RADCAB.[i] These asked students questions related to currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. [ii] Students were to arrive at an assessment of the source based on what it said about itself. At times, students practiced on hoax sites,[iii] clever but inauthentic substitutes for actual webpages. Only if factual accuracy seemed dubious were students advised to search laterally to confirm the same facts on three other sites, an ineffective strategy in an echo chamber environment.
As Google's single-search box accelerated container collapse, students struggled to recognize the genres on which they were to base their evaluations.[iv] Magazines, journals, newspapers all looked like websites. Instead, students gravitated toward relevance-ranked results delivered as context-free, miscellaneous answers[v] which often sufficed for their regurgitated bird reports.[vi]
Not only was the Internet disrupting publishing, but it also was devaluating traditional expertise. Self-branding, popularity, and notoriety became more influential than the credentials and formal expertise of professionals. Just as librarians redesigned triangulation strategies to corroborate networked information,[vii] reading teachers were redefining reading comprehension strategies in the face of "informational hypertexts" and "multiliteracies."[viii] In a networked environment in which elegant digital megaphones were being produced and uploaded by anyone wishing to promulgate anything—including misinformation or disinformation—educators sought new instructional approaches to sourcing, corroborating, and contextualizing information.
Rather than beginning with theoretical frameworks, recent scholarship has been investigating the real-world practices of successful searchers that might guide authentic instruction. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, history researchers and educators, chose fact checkers "because they are information generalists who in a single workday navigate topics that traverse a wide swath of disciplines, topics, and research methodologies."[ix] Like defensive drivers anticipating the unexpected behaviors of others, fact checkers quickly turned outward to aggregate views about a publisher's or author's reputation. By storing their findings in multiple browser tabs where they could be efficiently compared, fact checkers were managing their attention under time constraints and, as a result, producing assessments about the authority of a source in less time and with greater accuracy than disciplinary experts or veteran Internet searchers.[x]
Seeking, managing, and comparing selective "gossip" to make a quick judgment call pairs well with the dynamic webbed architecture of the Internet. The strategy isn't new but, in contrast to giving credibility to any single "megaphone," these fact checkers were developing a feel, through trial-and-error and educated guesses, for the trusted guides and reliable sources in an information sector that, in aggregate, will provide reasoned intelligence about an organization or actor.
As Wineburg and McGrew caution, this heuristic works for civic issues, appropriate when a citizen (or future citizen) wants a sense of the current players discussing gun control, wildfire mitigation, student loan forgiveness, or Supreme Court reform. It should not become a comprehensive strategy for an entire research project. During inquiry, students move through different stages of research from open exploration to a guiding question, and then to communicating, informing, and acting upon their new understanding. Students' thoughts, feelings, and actions change in response to different information and implementation needs and experiences.
In Weinberg's latest field study, high school students in government classes learned and practiced a series of sequential but flexible moves designed to improve their ability to use lateral thinking.[xi]
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Establish a Footing: Students' continually modify their current understanding of the Internet environment—"how one plants one's feet before typing the first word"—that shapes their online searching.[xii] Background knowledge about how information is created, why and where it is curated, and the characteristics of expertise and source types inform how students craft a search query. Their keywords consist of terms and formats they expect in their results rather than in the language of their question. -
Take Bearings: With limited time and attention, students develop a repertoire of "fast and frugal heuristics that allow them to get a quick lay of the land."[xiii] Selective and flexible use of strategies like "click restraint" enable a student to preview search snippets, recognize patterns in their results, and determine how a topic is situated and the quality of information available. -
Read Laterally: Students practice searching beyond the site, putting into practice how they take bearings. After clicking on a result, students return to the Internet to investigate the publisher's and author's reputation. Like fact checkers, they aggregate distributed evidence in browser tabs that will form the basis for a preliminary determination about the quality and relative value of the initial source.
Inspired by Wineburg and McGrew's initial work, I outlined an instructional sequence that could teach a modified triangulation heuristic.[xiv] It began with the trivial pursuit of matching a fact across sources to experience the echo chamber effect. Through a progressive series of activities in which students work with various source types and evidence, accompanied by prompts for different types of thinking, I hoped to teach a triangulation heuristic that could be used to verify certain kinds of facts. Unlike verifying a photograph or the source and accuracy of a quote where one searches for the original instance, students would use flexible triangulation to contextualize and assess authority and credibility. Lifelong learning includes the understanding of when to use a heuristic and when to disregard it.
The pre-service teacher's question should not be about which acronym to teach but rather how and why to teach it. Lateral reading and triangulation are mental shortcuts—strategies that address the problems of searching, evaluating, and using information in a dynamic environment. A routine is the repeated teaching of that strategy in ways that develop a habit. Guided practice is instruction that scaffolds incrementally more challenging situations so that students use, build on, or reject the strategy. Heuristic instruction builds a working understanding of the value of the strategy for life. Wineburg's latest field study has developed and tested a coherent model for teaching lateral reading. Friction isn't deciding which acronym to teach—it's about employing authentic heuristics in sequenced instruction.
References (Chicago style)
[i] Mike Caulfield, "A Short History of CRAAP," Hapgood (blog), entry posted September 14, 2018, https://hapgood.us/2018/09/14/a-short-history-of-craap/.
[ii] Kathleen Schrock, "Critical Evaluation of a Web Site: Secondary School Level," Internet Archive, last modified 2007, accessed November 13, 2022,
[iii] See early hoax examples such as Ken Umbach, "California's Velcro Crop under Challenge (1993)," Internet Archive, last modified December 1996, https://web.archive.org/web/20010418003542/http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html and James B. Wood, "The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus," Internet Archive, accessed November 13, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20000818130120/http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html.
[iv] Helena Francke and Olof Sundin, "Format Agnostics or Format Believers? How Students in High School Use Genre to Assess Credibility," Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 46, no. 1 (November 18, 2010): [Page #], https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.2009.1450460358.
[v] David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York, NY: Times Books, 2007),
[vi] David V. Loertscher, Carol Koechlin, and Sandi Zwaan, Ban Those Bird Units!: 15 Models for Teaching and Learning in Information-rich and Technology-rich Environments (Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research & Publishing, 2004),
[vii] Debbie Abilock, "Adding Friction: A Preservice Librarian Asks, 'How Can I Teach Triangulation Effectively?,'" School Library Connection, November 2018, https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Article/2180389.
[viii] Julie Coiro and Elizabeth Dobler, "Exploring the Online Reading Comprehension Strategies Used by Sixth-grade Skilled Readers to Search for and Locate Information on the Internet," Reading Research Quarterly 42, no. 2 (April 6, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.42.2.2.
[ix] Sam Wineburg et al., "Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-wide Field Study in High School Government Classes.," Journal of Educational Psychology 114, no. 5 (July 2022): 895, https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000740.
[x] Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, "Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information" (working paper, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, October 9, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048994.
[xi] See figures and tables in Wineburg et al., "Lateral Reading,"(2022) and lessons in Sam Wineburg et al., "Online Supplemental Materials for 'Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes'," APAPsycNet, https://supp.apa.org/psycarticles/supplemental/edu0000740/EDU_2020_0630_Supplemental_Materials.pdf.
[xii] Wineburg et al., "Lateral Reading," (2022): 897.
[xiii] Wineburg et al., "Lateral Reading," (2022): 897.
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MLA Citation
Abilock, Debbie. "Adding Friction. A Preservice Librarian Asks, 'CRAAP? SIFT? RAFT? COR? What Should I Teach?' ." School Library Connection, February 2023, schoollibraryconnection.com/content/article/2295302.
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