Teaching Information Evalu- ation and Critical Thinking Skills in Physics Classes

these lifetime skills can be incorporated in the curricu-lum even before graduate level. Not long ago, researching a school paper was a pro-cess that involved only one step: visit the library. These days students might not ever walk into a library since they have an immense amount of information at their fingertips (literally). In the end this may turn out to be an even more daunting task than browsing books in the library stacks or going through reels of micro-films of newspapers. There is a lot available, but how do you select, evaluate, and use what you find to best address the research question or to achieve the goal or task at hand? How will the “Millennial ” generation (born 1980s–2000s) learn these skills? Can these skills be taught, and if yes, when and how should they be taught? Background A quick scan of the library and information science literature will reveal a number of controversial posi-tions on this issue and there are no clear answers. Since the mid-1990s, librarians have been using the checklist model approach (assess authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage) to teach students how to eval-uate websites. An alternative model to the checklist has been proposed recently, through the use of a contex-tual approach when evaluating websites,1 which uses comparison and corroboration of information. The launch of the Educational Testing Service’s “Informa-tion and Communication Technology Literacy Test,”2 designed to assess students ’ proficiency in information and communication technology literacy in a higher-education environment, has only added more angles to the ongoing controversy. The response of educational institutions to this new testing initiative remains to be seen. As for where we are right now when it comes to educating students on how to best use and evaluate in-formation sources, the authors decided to first find out what students think about this topic