This chapter – the longest in the book – is devoted to one of the educator's most important roles when guiding a student tackling an independent learning project. An essay can only be as good as the information on which it is based. The phrase, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ swiftly comes to mind in this respect. It is often said that, whereas 30 years ago, one of the main challenges faced by young people undertaking an independent learning assignment lay in finding information, today – largely thanks to the World Wide Web – locating information is easy; it is identifying material which is pertinent and of high quality that has become problematic. The crucial skills are now those of evaluating, discriminating and differentiating. This is not to imply, of course, that, in time gone by, all the information students retrieved for school assignments was trustworthy. Indeed, the issue of information quality was recognised by Marland (1981, 32) as long ago as the early 1980s, when, in his classic ‘information skills curriculum’, he recommended a series of criteria that should be considered by someone as they decided whether or not particular sources are selected for use. These included ‘authority’, ‘reliability’ and ‘accuracy’ and they remain pertinent today.

McDougall and Ward (2017, 1) argue that, although ‘media texts are used across the curriculum as resources … critical engagement with them is not part of classroom activities’. If we consider that the engagement to which the authors refer extends into evaluation of the items, we may hypothesise that many students struggle with such appraisal not only because the skills are cognitively challenging but also because they receive insufficient practice at school in applying them. Educators looking to develop the information literacy of Sixth Formers may wish to reflect for a moment on which of these two barriers is greater in their own organisation.

Core issues

Nowadays, we tend to assume it is information we find via the internet that we need to subject to the greatest scrutiny and, to a significant degree, this is true. After all, the prevalence of ‘fake news’ on the World Wide Web and the inaccuracies within informal information, such as blogs and social media postings, are widely acknowledged. Today's world is rife with instances where lies and misconceptions have spread like wildfire because of the nature of modern electronic communication.