Rethinking CRAAP: Getting students thinking like fact-checkers in evaluating web sources

Abstract

For over two decades, librarians have been at the forefront of helping their patrons and students discern what online information is reliable, and what may be biased or outright false. Particularly as more formal information literacy programs developed at the college and university level (and the attendant inclusion of information literacy in many general education programs), academic librarians have developed curricula and taught students how to evaluate web sources for credibility. In many institutions, this has frequently been achieved via a “one-shot” session with a checklist of sorts, often some variation of the CRAAP Method (Currency, Reliability, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) developed nearly 15 years ago at California State University-Chico.