PBL Journal Entry #2

Entry 2: Expert problem solvers make sure the information they use is relevant and reliable.

"Relevant" means that the information directly applies to or answers your question(s).
* How did you decide if the information you discovered was relevant?

"Reliable" means that you can depend on the information to be true and without bias.
* How did you decide if it was reliable?
* What clues at a Web site or in printed sources can help you decide if the information was relevant and/or reliable?

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It seems like from high school to graduate level, we are still learning how to sort out what is relevant and reliable when searching. Now in that span of time, the internet has come a long way. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. This may be good because there is so much more information that we have available to us. And with free resources like Google Scholar and with databases through the university, we are able to find vast amounts of wonderful, good, reliable, and relevant information. On the flip side, however, the more stuff out there, the more there is to look through and the more of it is not reliable and not relevant to what we need to be researching.

To decide if the information we discovered is relevant, you must read through the source or it's summary/abstract and see if there is any information that aligns with our topic. For instance, on first glance at a title, you may think that the article will fit well with your topic, but then discover that it is way off target once you get reading.

To decide if the information we discovered is reliable, you need to be doing searches for peer reviewed articles and resources. Also, who is the author and what are their credentials? Was the study at hand a small sample of people where results could have gone either way? What was the conditions of the experiments?

I think looking at all the aspects above give clues to whether a source is reliable or unreliable, relevant or not. Hopefully by the time we have gotten to the graduate level, we are able to tell the difference (I hope).