Misinformation, Fact Checking, and Critical Thinking

Choose Reliable information sources!

As you research a topic you will retrieve many sources, including books, articles, and websites from a variety of different publishers and sources.  Some of the sources may be scholarly and have undergone rigorous peer review, while others, particularly those on the Internet, may not have undergone any review at all.  Thus, an essential step in the research process is to critically assess the quality, authority, and relevance of the information you find.

Ask yourself questions when evaluating resources for use in assignments.  There are many variations of evaluation methods you may have seen such as C.R.A.A.P. (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) T.R.A.A.P. (which labels Timeliness rather than Currency);  A CRAB (Authority, Currency, Relevance, Accuracy, Bias); C.A.R.S (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support); the 5 W's and an H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How).  All evaluation methods ask you to ask yourself questions to make sure the resource is the best fit for your research!

"Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking." from Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers.  Lateral reading means checking the information in other places before deciding that a source is good to use.

What is SIFT?

Use SIFT alongside skills like lateral reading and asking questions to help dig further into a source of information

SIFT stands for

STOP
INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE
FIND TRUSTED COVERAGE
TRACE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL

This is a quick and simple approach that can be applied to all sorts of sources, from scholarly articles to social media posts to memes, that will help you judge the quality of the information you're looking at.

SIFT was designed by Mike Caulfield, an expert in digital literacy, and based on research he and others have done in how people consume and think about media. 

Adapted from Michael Caulfield's "Check, Please!" course. The canonical version of this course exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc. The text and media of this site, where possible, is released into the CC BY, and free for reuse and revision. We ask people copying this course to leave this note intact, so that students and teachers can find their way back to the original (periodically updated) version if necessary. We also ask librarians and reporters to consider linking to the canonical version.