Resources for Evaluating Websites

Middle and High School Web Evaluation Checklists

Evaluation Rubrics, by Tammy Payton, are based on a 100-point scale, beginning with design features.

• Intermediate Grades
• Secondary Grades

"Critical Evaluation Surveys," on Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators site, also begins with design features.

• Middle School
• Secondary

Quality Information Checklist is highly graphical and includes a quiz. Discusses bias and implies that good sites are balanced.

College/Adult Checklist

• UW-Madison Checklist and Worksheet

Cautions about Checklists --

Stimulated by "Chucking the Checklist: A Contextual Approach to Teaching Undergraduates Web-Site Evaluation," by Marc Meola. portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 3 (2004): 331-344.

• Can become too mechanistic and may stress less important aspects of information sources (especially checklists that examine appearance and navigation)
• By stressing evaluating free websites, may be giving impression that the best sources are on the free web somewhere, whereas the best sources are often not on the free web, but rather in published articles and books, either available in online databases or in print
• One source isn't enough anyway -- suggest finding more than one source to up the reliability factor

Tutorials

• Evaluating Web Search Results (UW System Women's Studies Librarian; example relates to international women's issues)
  For more links on web evaluation, see "Evaluating Websites" page in this tutorial.
• Using A Metasite (UW System Women's Studies Librarian; example relates to international women's issues)