Mandy Lupton is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Her research has involved investigating university students’ experiences of using information to complete assignments in environmental studies, music and tax law. Her current research investigates teacher-librarians’ pedagogical practices in relation to inquiry learning and use of social media and Web 2.0 in schools.

Critical Evaluation of Information: Generic, Situated, Transformative and Expressive Windows

Critical evaluation of information is a fundamental element of information literacy. A number of rubrics and checklists exist for evaluating information from a range of sources. The rubrics commonly use questions and criteria such as provenance, currency, authority, credibility, trustworthiness, accuracy and bias. Some of these are related to particular sources such as web-based, journalistic and scholarly information, while others relate to particular disciplines such as interrogation of primary sources in an historical investigation.

In this presentation I explore my analysis of a range of ways of evaluating information using the Generic, Situated and Transformative perspectives from the GeST windows information literacy model (Lupton & Bruce 2010). I extend the original model by incorporating an Expressive window. I demonstrate that viewing evaluation of information through the four windows illuminates different qualities, and I argue that all four windows should be used in information literacy education.