Teacher Notes on Instruction-Writing Exercises

Exercise 15: Fact Checking on the Internet

SCHLOSSER'S CLAIMS:
In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser makes many wide-ranging empirical claims, including claims about

• biology (E. coli contamination in meat), and
• economics (across-decade spending comparisons).
   
  

I picked two such claims that could be confirmed or disconfirmed using reliable yet free sources on the Internet, then prepared "good" and "bad" instructions for checking those claims. Students use Hoey's matrix approach to practice taking instruction-revealing notes while I model the "good" fact-checking steps. Then they use those notes to find and improve flaws in the "bad" instructions, worked as a group exercise.

A HELPFUL WEBSITE:
The California State Library maintains a useful public-service World Wide Web "portal" (site with organized links to many other sites) to help students become acquainted with reputable online reference sources. Called Librarians' Internet Index (LII at URL lii.org), it offers a searchable, hierarchical, encyclopedia-like set of alphabetized topics (good for checking specific claims in biology or economics, for example). While the primary point of this exercise is to draft, evaluate, and improve fairly long instructions (which happen to be instructions for searching the Internet), a secondary point is to introduce students to this reliable, practical information portal.

HOW TO USE THIS EXERCISE:

(A) Note Taking.
The basic plan here is to practice in advance the sequence of actions needed to check two of Schlosser's claims by using LII-linked Internet resources, model that search for students during class, and have them capture what they see in structured notes that they could edit into useful instructions for others.

• Identify
  the claims that you want to verify online. I used Schlosser's claims that
  (1) "E. coli O157:H7 was most likely responsible for some human illnesses thirty or forty years ago. But the rise of huge feedlots, slaughterhouses, and hamburger grinders seems to have provided the means for this pathogen to become widely dispersed in the nation's food supply." (p. 196)
  (2) "In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more that $110 billion." (p. 3)
• Practice
  using LII to track down reputable websites that address your target claims. LII and the sites to which it links vary somewhat over time, so the exact details shown here may need adjustment to reflect the current configuration.
• Capture
  your steps in instructions that you can then use
  (1) as a guide, to reproduce smoothly and reliably during class, and
  (2) as a rubric, to evaluate student responses to the intentionally flawed instructions for this search that you later distribute (below).
  For example, here are my instructions (as of 2007) for checking the two specific claims mentioned above:

  
  [Use LII to check facts in biology/economics]
  
  Start your browser.
  Request lii.org.
       Type lii.org into the browser's Address field.
       Press ENTER (or RETURN).
            The top level LII topics and a few subtopics for each
            appear on the LII home page.
       Scroll down to see those that do not fit in your browser window.
  
  E. coli O157:H7
  
  Find the Health heading on the LII home page (topics are alphabetical).
  Select (click on) Diseases and Conditions under Health.
       More subtopics appear (under Health) in the left-hand column.
  Select Infectious Diseases from the list of new subtopics.
       Additional disease subtopics appear, plus "more subtopics" head.
  Select More Subtopics.
       Fifty specific diseases appear in the left-hand column.
  Select Foodborne Diseases from the alphabetical list
       Twenty-five one-paragraph website descriptions appear
       (right-hand column), each with a descriptive title.
  Select the fifth website, called
       CDC: Escherichia coli O157:H7 (click on its title).
       The CDC FAQ website appears, offers branches.
  
  Inflation rate
  
  Use the LII search engine (since location among topics is
       not obvious).
  Type    inflation rate   into the LII "Search entire collection for"
       field just under the home-page banner.
       WARNING: do NOT surround search term with quotes,
       even though it is two words, because LII always returns
       zero hits for quoted terms.
  Select the third reported website--"How much is that?"
  Select the first choice on its home page--"Five ways to compare
       the worth of a United States dollar"
  Type the target year, original year, and dollar amount into
       the conversion form fields.
  Click on the Submit Query button.
  
  

• Introduce
  Michael Hoey's matrix approach to taking notes on a process (or, as Hoey says in Textual Interaction, on a "happening"). I give each student a blank sheet of grid-ruled paper on which these column (top) and section (left) headings appear:

  
                    ACTION      ITEM
  
     Get Started
  
     Check E. coli
  
     Check inflation
  
  

  Under the "ACTION" column go the verbs for each step observed (e.g., "find"), while under the "ITEM" column goes the object (e.g., "the health heading...") of that action. The stub heads along the left side organize the notes into phases (sequences of topical clusters). With this framework, note taking becomes a structured, scaffolded way to notice and spell out the actions and focal items for each step in a complex process. This build-a-matrix technique lets students actively practice a crucial enabling skill, not just hear about it. And it captures relevant information needed to create good instructions for others.
• Demonstrate
  the use of LII to check claims by walking through your practiced search as students watch (large-screen projection of the interactive browser session, or use of large monitors, is the most dramatic way to do this, but a series of big, posted screen shots can also work well in classrooms with no Internet access). You can offer running commentary on the search process as well as on your own version of the note-taking matrix (I use a flip chart so that I can move it and point to it later) that you fill in with student help as you go along. This models both the fact-check search and taking notes on it at a pace that you can control to suit class needs.
• Review
  what has happened so far, in light of the good-instruction guidelines.
  (1) Students with adequate skills can go forward to edit their notes into formal instructions to share (perhaps working in small groups, or as homework).
  (2) Less prepared students can now use their notes (or if really inadequate, your public set) to find the flaws in an already drafted set of instructions for this LII search (next item below).

(B) Flaw Detection.
Even though this draft is two to three times larger than most of the previous exercises, students will find that their past practice in detecting flaws in instructions applies directly to this bigger task. The instruction-writing guidelines "scale up" easily to handle this long case, if students patiently work through it piecewise, just as real editors would on a real job. Their own "matrix of notes" (built above) helps here too, another authentic aspect of this bigger case. I invite students to find as many ways to improve this draft as they can. A side benefit is that while they use the line numbers (left edge) to tell specifically where they think improvements are needed, students gain experience with the edge-numbered format for focal text that appears often on the Language Arts portion of the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE).

(C) Fact-Checking Applied.
After the class has improved these instructions, I apply them by revealing the actual fact-checking results for the two Schlosser claims that started the search. I always include (at least) one claim that online research disconfirms (in this case, Schlosser ignored inflation in his cross-decade dollar comparisons).

Case:

Fact-checking Instructions, Draft Version to Improve

  1 You can check facts on the Internet by using a web browser.

  2 The Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a reliable place

  3 to check facts in specific subject areas

  4 (such as biology and economics).

  5 LII is organized in layers by topic,

  6 from general to more and more specific.

  7 Starting the web browser (such as Internet Explorer)

  8 on your computer is the first step.

  9 

 10 Requesting the LII website requires typing lii.org into the

 11 Address or Location field near the top of the browser window.

 12 Then you can select (click on) the topic or subtopic on which

 13 you want more information from the list on LII's home page.

 14 Don't forget to press ENTER (or RETURN) after you type lii.org.

 15 If your browser window is short, you must scroll down

 16 to see the full list of topics covered.

 17 

 18 The alphabetical list of topics on the LII home page contains

 19 a heading called Health.

 20 Select (click on) the Diseases and Conditions subheading

 21 under Health and when additional subtopics appear in the

 22 left-hand column,

 23 select Infectious Diseases from the new subtopics.

 24 Select Foodborne Diseases from the list of

 25 fifty diseases that appears in response to your

 26 picking More subtopics from the short list of subheads

 27 under the Infectious Diseases topic revealed above.

 28 This could be very relevant information.

 29 Under Foodborne Diseases are one-paragraph

 30 descriptions of 12 websites covering different pathogens.

 31 The fifth one is called

 32      CDC: Escherichia coli O157:H7

 33 and you can click on its title to retrieve biological

 34 and medical details on E. coli.

 35 

 36 Use the LII search engine instead of the topic headings

 37 to find inflation-rate information, since its place

 38 among the topics is not obvious.

 39 If you wish you can type the term inflation rate

 40 into the field marked "Search entire collection for"

 41 found just under the banner on the LII home page.

 42 It is strongly suggested that you do not surround

 43 your search term with quotation marks, because the

 44 LII search engine always returns zero hits for

 45 quoted terms.

 46 Select the proper website from the list of three returned.

 47 Select the first choice there, called "Five ways to

 48 compare the worth of a United States dollar."

 49 Click in the Submit Query button, but

 50 before that type the target year, original year,

 51 and amount into the conversion form.

Note:

This exercise most closely supports the following 1998 California English-Language Arts content standard(s).
Reading:
Grade 3--"Read aloud fluently."
Grade 9/10--"Critique the logic of functional documents...in anticipation of reader misunderstandings" (p. 57).
Grade 11/12--"Analyze both the features and the rhetorical devices of...public documents" (p. 66).
Writing:
Grade 7--"Revise writing to improve organization and word choice after checking the logic of the ideas and the precision of the vocabulary" (p. 44).
Grade 8--"Establish coherence within and among paragraphs" (p. 51).
Grade 9/10--"Write technical documents...report information and convey ideas logically and correctly...anticipate reader problems" (p. 61).