EVALUATE the QUALITY of SOURCES

Open access to this new interactive rubric helps educators teach students proper research and source evaluation.

Turnitin worked with educators to develop The Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER), an interactive rubric to analyze and grade the academic quality of Internet sources used by students in their writing. Instructors and students who use SEER can quickly evaluate a website and arrive at a single score based on five criteria scaled to credibility: Authority, Educational Value, Intent, Originality, and Quality.

"Recent research shows that students rely heavily on websites of questionable academic value," said Jason Chu, senior education manager for Turnitin. "We believe that widespread usage of SEER will help educators teach students the importance of using quality resources in their research."

This interactive rubric, when opened in Adobe Reader, allows you to adjust criteria weight and simply click to score each criterion with a rubric score and percentage automatically calculated.

SEER IN ACTION

Turnitin developed SEER in conjunction with secondary and higher education instructors who field-tested it on over 300 websites that are commonly used by students as sources in their writing. This was the basis for the recent Turnitin white paper, "What's Wrong with Wikipedia: Evaluating the Sources Used by Students," which highlights the recent findings regarding student research practices and offers guidance on using the rubric to improve student research skills.

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