This lesson is intended as a single session within a major’s research methods course. Rather than using a shorter “scholarly vs. non-scholarly” comparison worksheet, this activity asks students to work in groups to systematically examine a scholarly article in depth, identify and evaluate its various components visually and in writing, and then compare it to a non-scholarly article on the same topic. Groups then report back to the entire class.

This activity/assignment was designed for a first year composition course in collaboration with an English/Writing instructor. It could be used in an information literacy credit course, First Year Experience course, or in another discipline-specific context. The purpose of the lesson is to lay the foundation for students to be able to read scholarly work more effectively and critically.

Through a partnership between english composition and library faculty, a composition course focused on the exploration of discourse communities and led to student engagement with the ACRL frames, authority is constructed and contextual and scholarship as conversation. The faculty aimed to incorporate components of contemplative pedagogy into the course through the use of highly-facilitated classroom discussions to tackle the messy mind.

P.R.O.V.E.N. is designed to provide students with a source evaluation process that is grounded in the ACRL Framework. The "PROVEN" acronym emphasizes the process students should go through to demonstrate credibility based on their particular needs, rather than the state of a particular source (i.e. credible or not). The questions are designed to guide the evaluation process, not to serve as a checklist.

Students often depend on citation generators provided by databases, library discovery tools, and websites when tasked with correctly formatting their references. However, these generators often make mistakes that students don’t notice. This activity will help students to look critically at the citations provided by citation generators and to find the mistakes. This will both help students learn the citation style of their discipline and to look more critically at seemingly quick fixes during the research process.