What information sources do you use?

Our world is filled with information. Some is educational content, but much of it is entertainment or opinion. When I talk to students, I often hear that they use social media to learn about the world. There are so many sources of information, both formal and informal. The issue we have is not being able to find information, it is deciding what information can and should be used.

As you think about the information you see or hear each day, consider:

• Where do I typically hear about recent events?
• Do I trust the information I hear or see?
• Do I take steps to verify what I hear or see?
• What sources could I use to understand topics or events with more depth?
• Where do I need to build better information-gathering and analysis skills?

The sources you use for information, both casual (in daily life like social media) and formal (those you seek out to learn more), are important as they shape how you think. To complicate things, you are likely to choose sources that match what you already think—a concept called confirmation bias. Working only to confirm what you know will limit your learning and success and set you up for errors in the decisions you make.

How do you make decisions?

You likely make many decisions in your life. Some are small, like what to eat, and others may have lost lasting impacts, like what to study.   Either way, you likely have a way to approach decisions. Some people use what feels right to them, and others may make decisions using what they feel is a logical process. Think carefully about how you tend to make decisions- and then think about how those decisions usually work out for you.

In college, you will be asked to make decisions, including

• How to manage your physical, mental, and emotional health
• Choosing topics for a paper
• Determining what classes to take
• How to approach an internship application
• Choosing to study vs. spending time with friends (both are important!)
• How to prepare for an exam
• How to handle financial aid and loan paperwork
• When to reach out for help- and who to ask
• What sources to use for a project

The list of decisions can feel endless! If you look to make decisions you are comfortable with, you’ll need more than just an emotional response. You’ll need information. When we work with information, you may see a clear answer just from reviewing what we know and what is known about a topic. However, if the problem or decision is complex, you might find that making a decision using a step-by-step process can be helpful.  For example, you might:

1. Explain the decision you need to make and the problem that you are facing
2. Read sources related to the problem
3. Determine what a successful outcome will look like
4. List your possible decisions and the likely outcomes of each, including positive and negatives
5. Envision each of these possible decisions and how they will fit into your life
6. Make your choice and decide
7. Monitor what happens and react

Steps like this can help you make a decision you are comfortable with. For most people, a successful decision is one that maximizes the positive outcomes while minimizing the negative outcomes. A decision that uses information readings and careful consideration is likely to feel comfortable and take advantage of both your head (thinking) and your emotional intuition.  Even if a decision ends up not being ideal, using a process and monitoring what happens will let you make the best of the decision and the resulting situation.

Information, evidence, and college

One of the things that you learn, or should learn, in college is that your opinions, ideas, and decisions should all be based on INFORMATION and EVIDENCE.

Information is data that has been organized and analyzed. It helps us to understand the situation, cause or affection, experience or process. By itself, it does not tell us anything- it is only through careful reflection and application that we can use information in a useful way.

Evidence is information that has been carefully selected, evaluated, and used to support a position, idea, or outcome. For many college assignments, evidence is created by others, and you base your work on it—for example, journal articles that summarize research. (Hint: You’ll need to cite your evidence and sources because it is the right thing to do and because it protects your work by showing where you drew your ideas and background from.)

As knowledge workers, scholars (which include your faculty, the students in your college, and YOU) use a structured method of inquiry (that’s a fancy way of saying we have a careful, step-by-step approach to information and problem-solving) to gather what others have learned, learn what isn’t already documented, and to propose new solutions and ideas.

Most of college-level work requires that you explain your ideas and present the process and evidence you’ve used- not just the outcome of your work.

Why do I need to use sources for information and evidence?

Throughout your education and life, you’ll build a vast knowledge base filled with information on many different subjects. When you think of a subject or topic or work to solve a problem or make a decision, you’ll filter this knowledge through your own experience. It is easy to misremember or misstate information when you work from memory. And often, you won’t have the information you need in your memory.

Using sources in your work will:

• Ensure you remember and interpret information correctly
• Increase your credibility with others, as you give proper credit to the people you are basing your ideas and work on
• Ensure that your audience can track back where the information came from using your citation. This is especially important if a topic can be controversial, as you are not the one who said or documented the information.

Working with sources

You’ll need to work with sources throughout your college experience and beyond. As information is easier to find (and create), one of the most important tasks we have is to ensure that we use good information, provide credible (trustworthy) evidence, and approach each source with caution.

The kinds of information available to you

Since there is a vast amount of information available to you, it helps to break it down and look at what they are and when you will use it. Most sources use similar or even the same technology to access them, which makes it even more overwhelming. There are many ways to sort information – by who created it, who or where it is published, and by the type of information it has (and these are just a few). Let’s look at some of the common ways you could separate information.

Primary vs secondary vs tertiary sources

You’ll use different types of sources in your writing, depending on what you need to do.

There are other sources of information that you should use with caution (or avoid) including personal opinions on topics that the speaker or writer has minimal or no knowledge of. Many internet sources fall into this category and should not be used for decision-making.

Sources of information

You will have access to an overwhelming amount of material as a student, but most will fall into these categories. The challenge for a student is to decide what type of source to use and then how to find and use it. Start here by deciding what type of material you want to look for.

🗈A note about Data Sets: Datasets are collected data, usually in raw numbers or text, that have not been analyzed. Many of the sources you do read- both popular and scholarly- are based on data.  Before using a dataset, talk with your instructor to learn how to read, interpret, and analyze them.

Where should I look for sources?

Finding sources of information is easy- ensuring you use good sources is the challenge. Depending on what you need, you’ll start by searching the internet, using specific online sites, or your college library. When you are not sure where to start, reach out to your librarian- your college library will often have someone on the reference desk who can be reached by phone, email, or live chat.

Reading with purpose- and strategy

Once you have sources, you need to read them. College reading can be extensive—a class can ask you to read 20 or more pages weekly. Multiply that by a full course load of 4 to 5 classes, and you can easily find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of reading you need to do. Sources are often long reads too- including journal articles that are 20 or more pages long.  So what do you do?

1. Schedule your time: block out time for reading.
2. Preview your readings: Quickly skim through them so you know what they include and how long they are.
3. Plan by deciding how to divide your reading time (hint: read and take notes on small parts of readings on a schedule).
4. Read and take notes.

One good reading strategy is this 3 step model that my students use.

There are many other reading strategies, like the S3R or PSR that can help you with reading.

Following a strategy (a set of steps designed to increase your chances of success in a task) can make your reading time more effective and useful.

Taking useful notes from sources

Notes can be helpful if they target what you need to remember and retain. Physical writing can help you remember what you read, and taking notes can help you as you read and after when you have something to refer back to. A good goal for taking notes is to write what you need to remind you of what the source contains and to keep your notes focused on these ideas: what confirms what you believe or have experienced, what contradicts what you think or have experienced, what you are now curious about and need to look into or think about more, what has confused you and you need clarification, and finally, what you can connect to your prior knowledge and experiences.

When you begin taking notes, write down the information about the source, including the article or reading name and author and where it was published (for example, the website URL or the journal). If you have a citation for it, write it down- it will save you time later.

Good notes will have:

• Article information (title, author, date, publishing information, etc.)
• Main idea
• Brief summary
• Specific facts that are useful to the work you are doing
• Connection to the work you are doing (for example, your paper, test, or project)

You might want to annotate (take notes physically on) the reading, and if so, you can add the following to the file or paper you are reading:

• Highlights for key points and vocabulary
• Summary notes (1 per paragraph or a few sentences per section)

Things to remember about notes:

• Notes are there to help you recall what a source includes
• Notes should not recreate the sources, so do not rewrite the source
• Your  notes should be written in your own words
• Keep a section for things you need to look up. For example, you may want to look up a theory or idea, a researcher or other person
• Keep a list of new words or familiar words used in new ways
• Bullet points, drawings, and other short-form writings can be helpful in your notes
• Write down page numbers for things  you take notes on so you can easily refer to the reading as needed
• Focus on making sure your notes remind you of the source instead of replacing the source

Think of notes on readings as a guide to the reading itself, with just enough detail to help you remember what the reading includes so you can locate and revisit it when needed.

How to approach learning on a new topic- the deep dive

In your life, you will have times when you need information. Not the shallow information you gather from simple conversations or web searches, but rather deep and detailed information you can use to make important decisions. People use this type of deep and detailed information for:

• Personal and lifestyle decisions
• Health decisions
• Financial decisions
• Career guidance
• Complex situations that have no easy answers
• Understanding problems that are uncommon or have significant risk

When you need to manage one of these decisions or situations, you’ll need to work with the best (most accurate, reliable, and recent) information. But where do we even start?

As a college student, you’ll build the skills needed for a deep dive and practice them in most of your classes. You’ll find that you use a deep dive process in a variety of disciplines with different goals and topics. In each, you’ll need to identify your focus, determine what evidence (sources of information) you will need, synthesize it, and present it.

College deep dives are good practice for your personal life and career—after all, you’ll be faced with many important situations, problems, and decisions in your life.

Building informed opinions

Deep dives are good for helping you build an informed opinion. In your classes, you work towards this, too, but often, you will find yourself needing to learn about topics on your own. This is where the deep dive process is helpful. An informed opinion means that you have enough background information to understand what you read, you know the language used in more rigorous, dense, and scholarly readings, and you can apply what you read to real-world issues in your personal or academic life.

Brainstorming new ideas

The first step in a deep dive is determining WHAT you want to learn and WHY you need to. Sometimes, this will be assigned to you or obvious to you, but other times, you’ll need to decide on your own how to take what you need to know and make it interesting and realistic. When you have a topic, consider this model:

Topic + 2nd topic + population= deep dive topic

So, for example, you might take a prompt from faculty in a health class about mental illness. You could refine that to depression and then add in impacts on daily living and young adults. You can further refine that into a question. The same goes for a class on American history asking about culture and its impacts on society.

Depression + impact on daily living + young adults

Music in the 1920’s + gender roles + women 

Creating new knowledge

The idea of new knowledge sounds heavy- but it is about answering questions that still need to be answered or applying known information to new situations or problems. For example, you may take your topics from above and look at what has already been answered and what hasn’t. You likely will find writing about a topic that others have written extensively on to be boring since you won’t find much room to be creative and curious. On the other hand, taking the assigned topic and finding new ways to approach it can let you focus on what you are interested in and make the project or paper your own. You’ll start the process with a question:

Depression + impact on daily living + young adults = How does depression treatment, including therapy and medication, affect how young adults complete their daily tasks?

OR

How does the music in the 1920s reflect the accepted gender role of women during that time period? 

These types of questions can help you build your deep-dive plan, identify the sources you need, and guide your choices as you begin your work. By planning before you begin, you’ll have a deeper understanding of what you want to do, building on your informed opinion, and you may be able to approach your project in a way that is interesting and meaningful to you.

Your next steps

Once you know what your focus is and the question you’ll seek to answer, you’ll then:

• Locate the sources you need
• Read and synthesize those sources to come to an answer to your question
• Document your answer in a paper or presentation as assigned

Things to remember

• Save your sources as files on your computer
• Take notes on every source
• Plan breaks in the reading and writing process so you have a chance to think about what you are learning and how it fits together
• Use proper formatting- many college classes use APA formatting, though some may use MLA or Chicago (or another format). Follow the instructions from your instructor and seek help at your campus writing center. Remember, writing formats like APA help you structure and format your paper and document your sources.

What is research?

A deep dive into a topic can be called research, especially when answering a new question or applying the knowledge you gained to a new situation or problem. That said, the word RESEARCH has a specific meaning in colleges and universities.

Research is a rigorous, systematic, first-hand investigation into a phenomenon. It uses a carefully planned and documented set of steps with goals to proceed. Research may describe or explain what is happening or test ideas (hypotheses) that have been formed. It can be conducted to explore what is happening or to try to predict or control what can happen.

The goal of research is typically to understand and improve our lives. Research contributes to the “body of knowledge” in a field, what is known about a specific topic, subject, area, phenomenon, or problem. Research is published and stored in scholarly peer-reviewed journals for use by others in the field.

Things to know about college and university research:

• Research has a structured and organized set of steps, from planning, data collection, analysis,  and documentation.
• Research strives to be objective and unbiased and requires the researcher to be aware of their own preconceived ideas and how they can affect the research process.
• Research can only be done with formal permission by the Institutional Review Board.
• Research requires empirical evidence collected through hands-on work, including surveys, interviews, observations,  and more.
• Research starts with a clearly stated question, problem, or hypothesis and focuses on that throughout the project.
• Researchers working with people, animals, or their information must follow a strict code of ethics to ensure safety and privacy and to avoid harm to their participants.
• Researchers use critical thinking (and tools like statistics) to analyze and draw conclusions from the data they collect.
• There are many different types of research methodologies, each with its own guiding principles, language, and tools.

Your college likely tracks faculty and student research (hint: your librarian can help you find research). Many faculty members invite students to participate in research initiatives, so if you are interested, ask your major department what research is active.

Research is a major part of college and university work- and yet most students are not aware that it is happening. In fact, many universities are research institutions, with full-time faculty spending more time completing research activities than teaching classes!  Colleges and universities are known for the knowledge they create through research- and change the world daily by their work.