Assignment 2 – Gathering Evidence
Learning Objectives Covered
When people write in the workplace, they often have to decide how to solve problems based on conflicting evidence. Part of what will help you be successful at finding the best solutions will be getting the best evidence. The Modern Language Association (MLA) suggests we focus on the CRAAP method of evaluation when trying to determine the reliability and quality of sources (see Modern Language Association (2009).
CRAAP stands for:
For this assignment, we will only focus on Currency, Authority, and Accuracy.
For this assignment, you will evaluate two sources using the CRAAP method. Use the questions under each of the criteria to help answer if the source is strong. For each criteria area, give a value on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being very weak and 5 being very strong).
Notice that your assignment will evaluate the two sources separately, like this:
You can also use other academic resources such as Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com (Links to an external site.)) or EBSCO (found in our library). For the purposes of this assignment, strong sources are ones that have high ratings for currency, authority, and accuracy.
To select a source, do a quick CRAAP analysis to see if it is strong enough to use. You will do a more thorough analysis after you narrow down your choices to the two strongest ones.
NOTE: Wikipedia, Ask.com, and other crowd-sourced sites are never, ever acceptable sources for an academic paper.
Follow the Institution Writing Guidelines to create a citation for your source.
For each of the two sources from Step 1, assess the source’s currency, authority, and accuracy. Make sure to give each section a rating (for example, one to five stars). Make sure you answer the questions below.
Currency
When evaluating the currency of your two sources, answer the following questions for each one:
Authority
Ask yourself these questions when evaluating Authority:
Accuracy
It can be difficult to analyze a source’s accuracy, because you may not be an expert on the topic. What you are looking for is evidence that the source was scrutinized by an expert. If there are problems you can see, there is a very good chance that the author did not have to ensure the site’s information was accurate. Here are the questions to ask:
Once you have evaluated your sources, share either a direct quote, summary, or paraphrase from each source. These should be quotes/summaries/paraphrases that you plan on using in your paper. Make sure that you include the correct in-text citation for each one.
Your final assignments should be at least 300 words.
You can click here to see optional sources for your essay.
I’ve included examples on how to do for this assignment along with links of how to do this assignment.
https://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&as_sdt=0,34
Use the template below