2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When looking at a resource for use in engineering coursework, students might hear terms from their professors around quality or credibility. But learning to evaluate resources is a skill that many undergraduate students need constant information literacy instruction in throughout their college careers. In fact, knowing how to evaluate information found in a search of literature is an important skill for any researcher to develop. So often, when librarians are invited into the classroom, they feel motivated to find interesting and catchy ways to get students interested in these skills. Which is how different evaluation methods have been developed over the years, with the CRAAP (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) test having become the most widely used. However, most of these methods focus only on content, while ignoring the researcher’s own biases and how these evaluated resources relate to other published materials on the same topic. While some of the differing resource evaluation methods don’t necessarily have an attached acronym, they still tend to focus on the content over the student researcher.

In 2016, librarians at Marshall University created a new method that attempts to fill in these gaps. Titled IF I APPLY, this method expands the familiar CRAAP test to control for confirmation bias and determine where the source fits into other existing research. This method focuses first on the personal steps and then on the content steps. When one of the librarians from Marshall University brought this method to [institution name], it seemed like a hit across many subject areas. Therefore, this papers’ authors have explored and taught this method to their engineering students in several different engineering disciplines across the curriculum.

This paper seeks to explore different methods of resource evaluation and share where IF I APPLY fits into the information credibility corpus. Examining these methods allows the authors the opportunity to engage with the history of information credibility. Additionally, anecdotes from the classroom will be incorporated within the paper to share how IF I APPLY can be used across the engineering curriculum. The paper will end with a view towards the resource evaluation future.