Note: This is the fourth of a seven-part series exploring possible integration of AI into the research process.
Resource: Students may use this Step 4: Evaluating Information Template to help guide their work. Revise as needed for your classroom.
To this point, we’ve completed three phases of the research process. A task has been defined, a preliminary plan has been developed by gaining some general background knowledge, and the types of sources that may best match the research goals have been identified and are starting to be located.
The fourth step builds off of these first three, and in many ways, it may be one of the most important skills that our students can develop in this age of hyper-available information. In this step, students need to actively find credible content that will help them support their research question or proposed thesis statement. In other words, now that they’ve identified sources to target, they need to dig into them and pick out the most relevant articles, entries, titles, and content.
The processes of using a database or conducting an effective web search to find relevant content are important skills in themselves, and each research tool requires users to know how to navigate and search that platform. Because these tools and platforms are continually changing and often vary by school, your library media specialist is probably your best resource in this area. Rather than trying to keep up on these options yourself, it can be more effective to bring those experts into your classroom to teach or co-teach lessons on using the specific tools.
As for those broader skills, this is a place where you can step in and help students develop important transferable skills. As they research, students will need to continually evaluate the information they find for relevance, credibility, quality, and completeness. AI tools may play a part with each of these criteria.
Relevance
One key check is in regard to relevance. A source can be accurate, credible, and well written and still not be useful for the specific research task at hand. It must also be relevant to the identified research goals.
As students focus on relevance, they need to ask questions like:
- “Does this information actually help me answer my research question?”
- “Does it connect to one of the areas in my preliminary outline?”
This is where the planning that students engaged in earlier becomes especially valuable. Specifically, the preliminary outline that students created in the second step can now function like a research topic checklist. Students must now find information to support each section of information identified in that outline. As students encounter information about their broader topic area, they should ask if and where it fits into their plan. If they can’t identify a clear connection, then that source is likely something they do not need. It’s not relevant.
Students need to resist the urge to simply gather the first batch of resources that are loosely connected to their topic. They should narrow their lens and critically examine each item that they find to determine if it’s actually relevant to their identified and narrowed purpose. Having their preliminary plan readily accessible while they search can be very helpful.
AI can be useful here as a thinking partner and to help students perform an initial relevance scan.
For instance, students might enter their research question and preliminary outline into an AI tool, along with initial notes and takeaways from a source, and ask questions such as:
- “Is this content relevant to my research question? If so, in what ways?”
- “Which sections of my outline could this source potentially support?”
One tool that can be especially useful for facilitating this is Google’s Gemini Notebook (previously called NotebookLM). Students can upload content into these notebooks and then ask specific questions about that content, either individually or as a group. This is a great tool for conducting that initial relevancy vetting and can be a big time-saver. Anything not relevant can be removed from the notebook while relevant content can remain for deeper exploration later in the process.
Of course, you don’t have to allow students to use AI during this phase of the research process. That is your choice, but if you do allow it, it’s important to stress that the students themselves must make the final decisions about content relevance. The AI tool can help to save time by quickly scanning or identifying alignment with a preliminary outline, but students must not relinquish their decision-making role in the process.
If, in this initial scan, students think that the content will be relevant, they should remember they might still change their mind later as they dig deeper and find additional research. The process is fluid, and opinions about relevance can change along the way. As they begin reading, listening, or viewing the content, students may find that their initial decisions were inaccurate. That is a perfectly acceptable and common situation.
Credibility
A second criterion is credibility. This is an area that many people immediately associate with evaluating information, and it’s incredibly important. When we refer to credibility, we’re essentially speaking to trustworthiness and accuracy. Can I trust this information? Is it accurate and reliable?
To determine credibility, students should ask targeted questions like:
- “Who created this information?”
- “What expertise or experience do they have?”
- “Who published it?”
- “What evidence is provided?”
- “Can important claims be verified somewhere else?”
- “Why is this information being shared?”
Another important check is to see what happens when we leave the source itself and look at what other sources say about it. The process of reading across multiple resources for consistency and fact-checking is called lateral reading, and it’s an important skill for students to develop. While students can stay on a website and look for an About page to find additional details about an author or organization, it’s equally important to open additional tabs and investigate what other sources say about the author, organization, publication, or claims. In fact, this practice is oftentimes more insightful and trustworthy than relying on what a source says about itself.
AI can support this process as well, but this is also an area where students need to be especially careful about outsourcing judgment.
A student might ask AI: “What questions should I investigate to determine whether this organization is a credible source on this topic?” That’s very different from asking: “Is this source credible?” The first prompt gives students an investigation plan and helps them build their research skillset. The second hands the judgment over to the AI. We want students to be the ones making that crucial judgment.
Additionally, any AI-generated information should be evaluated using those same procedures. If an AI tool gives students a claim, statistic, quotation, or explanation, that output doesn’t get a free pass simply because it is presented confidently and definitively. Students should trace important information back to reliable sources and ask: “Where did AI pull this information from, and did it do so accurately?”
This is true both when interacting with an AI chatbot and when students review AI-generated web search summaries. Students may be tempted to casually accept the accuracy of these summaries because they sound authoritative and reasonable, but they should be aware that AI-generated results can contain errors and inaccuracies.
Quality
Next comes quality. Credibility and quality overlap, but there’s an important distinction. A source may come from a credible organization and still not be particularly useful or contain strong content.
Students must look at the quality of the information itself, not just the quality of the source. Even the most respected experts can drift off topic or share an idea that has not yet been fully developed, vetted, or supported.
Some key questions that a student can ask include:
- “Does the author provide evidence?”
- “Are claims explained and supported?”
- “Is the information specific and not vague?”
- “Does it acknowledge complexity or competing perspectives?”
- “Are sources cited?”
- “Does the information appear to be primarily informative, persuasive, promotional, or entertaining?”
Students might also compare several sources covering the same idea or claim in order to ensure that there is agreement on the issue. That comparison can be incredibly powerful, and students may encounter topics where there are conflicting opinions. It’s important that they understand this and are able to distinguish these nuances in the information they find.
Even when two sources agree on the core ideas, students can still ask themselves: “Which of these sources provides the strongest evidence for this part of my research, and why?”
AI can again serve as a thinking partner in this process.
Students might paste notes from two or three sources into an AI tool like Gemini Notebook and ask it to help them identify similarities, differences, missing evidence, or claims that deserve further investigation.
They might ask:
- “What important differences do you notice in how each of these sources explain this issue?”
- “What claims appear in one source but not the others that I should investigate further?”
- “Are there claims in one source that are refuted or contradicted in another?”
With this approach, AI is helping students notice things, and each of those things requires the student to further investigate and make the final decision about the quality of the content.
Completeness
Finally, we have completeness. This is an evaluation skill that sometimes gets overlooked. Students may find several credible, high-quality sources and assume their research is finished. However, the question they need to be asking is: “Do I have enough information to understand this topic well?”
This is where students should again return to their preliminary outline and ask questions like:
- “Do I have enough information to support each section of my outline?”
- “Do I need to revise my outline or find more information?”
- “Am I relying too heavily on one source?”
- “Do all of my sources represent essentially the same perspective?”
- “Are there important voices or viewpoints missing?”
- “Are there questions that I still cannot answer?”
While the preliminary outline is very helpful and should be used as a guide, it is not infallible either. After all, students created this at the beginning of the process, before they researched more deeply into the content. Upon learning more, they may realize that they missed the mark when they created that initial plan. It is okay, and even expected, that they will revise this plan as they progress through the research process and learn more about their topic.
This is another place where AI can be useful. Students could provide their research question, outline, and notes and then ask:
- “What gaps do you notice in the information I’ve collected so far?”
- “What additional perspectives might help me develop a more complete understanding of this topic?”
If students are using Gemini Notebook, they can check off all of their sources and then paste in a copy of their preliminary plan along with their question. This neatly limits the AI response to those related resources. If they want to check only a portion of their outline, they can uncheck any resources unrelated to the chosen section.
During this review, AI might identify something the student overlooked. If there are gaps, the student knows to continue researching, or they might determine that the section is not necessary and can be removed from the plan.
Once again, the AI response is a suggestion to investigate, not an answer to automatically accept.
The Larger Goal
Across all four of these criteria, there’s a larger skill we’re trying to develop. We want students to become thoughtful and critical consumers of information. As the information landscape continues to expand, those skills matter more now than ever before.
Students can now use online tools to generate an explanation in seconds. Search engines can summarize results before students ever visit a source. Social media algorithms continuously place information in front of them. Increasingly now, students may not even know whether the words, images, audio, or video that they encounter were created by a person, generated by AI, or produced through some combination of the two.
That makes evaluation less of a step that students complete during a research project and more of an ongoing habit of mind whenever they encounter information. As students complete this step of the research process, they should develop the habit of asking four key questions every time they are presented with new information:
- “Is this relevant?”
- “Is it credible?”
- “Is it high-quality?”
- “Do I have enough information to understand the issue well?”
AI can help students ask those questions, compare information, identify gaps, and surface things worth investigating, but this is one part of the research process where students should be particularly careful not to outsource the important thinking to AI.
You could even have students complete this step without any AI use at all. However, students are increasingly turning to AI as a thought partner whether we explicitly allow it or not. Because of that, it might be prudent to guide them through what responsible AI use can look like in the research process to set them up for success researching when we are not there to guide them.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Opportunity Knowledge
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
- Align the Work
Extend Your Learning
- Evaluating Sources: Introduction (Purdue OWL)
- Harvard Guide to Using Sources (Harvard College Writing Program)
- ChatGPT (OpenAI)
- Claude (Anthropic)
- Gemini (Google)
- Copilot (Microsoft)
- Gemini Notebook (Google)